Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  The air felt warmer down here, and the thick sweet scent of vegetation rose around them as they beat their way up the valley toward the lake and the little village. She heard a clicking on the intercom, and then an unfamiliar voice spoke in heavily accented English. Lele couldn’t place the origin, but she thought it sounded vaguely European.

  “You will make land beside the shore, yes? I will direct.”

  “As long as you direct an LZ that works,” Lele said, her tone hard and unyielding. She wasn’t going to let this guy kill her, either.

  “Next to large building on lakeshore, there is large field. Good LZ.”

  “No wires?”

  “No wires,” he said, and Lele thought she heard laughter in his voice. Maybe the people out here weren’t at the point of having electricity in their villages. Some of these colonies had regressed dramatically since coming to Terra Nova. In the back of her mind, something that might have been pity stirred. She shoved it away with all the rest of her emotions and focused on staying tight on lead.

  “You show me, and if I can land there, I will,” she said.

  “Okay, Yes. Good,” the man said, and that was all. At least he knew better than to clutter up her intercom with chatter. She checked her clock and the orbital timestamp. Almost there.

  “One minute,” she said into the intercom. She felt, more than heard, the teams getting positioned for their infil. Next to her, Jack toggled the arming switches for their defensive systems and ran through a preliminary diagnostic check from his side.

  “Sonofabitch,” she muttered then. Lead had started his approach, but he’d done it badly. Rather than staying low and doing a smooth, level deceleration, Alcasar or his copilot had cranked back on the cyclic without reducing the power, which resulted in a nose-high climb and rapid decel. Rather than follow him into a bad situation, she kept her nose down and took a small bid out to the right.

  “Two’s going around, right side,” she transmitted, aware that she was going to catch hell for it later on. Going around was not, typically speaking, a tactically sound maneuver. It was, however, better than crashing, which is what she would have done if she’d have allowed lead to drag her into that crap approach path.

  “This is LZ, Two O’Clock low,” the team lead in the back said. Lele banked the bird up to the right and caught sight of the field in question. It was open and rectangular, like a soccer green, and it sat next to a long, low-slung building.

  “Got it, on the approach,” Lele said, her voice empty of emotion. She eased back on the cyclic, lifting the nose while sliding the collective to the floor.

  “Ninety knots, power’s out, sink’s nil,” Jack replied with his own empty voice. Lele continued her aft cyclic, letting the airspeed bleed off in a level deceleration. When the airframe started to shudder in the classic “burble” that signaled effective translational lift, she relaxed her aft pressure and let the nose come down to a level attitude. Then, just as smoothly as she’d put it down, pulled in collective with her left hand in order to cushion her landing to the flat, level surface of the field.

  “Team’s cleared out,” she said.

  “Good flying!” the team lead’s voice came back through the intercom. He sounded excited and joyful. Lele looked over her shoulder to see him and his buddies unass the aircraft, and then she got on the interplane frequency.

  “Lead, this is two. Be advised, customer directed an LZ forward and to your two o’clock. We’re down, awaiting further orders.”

  “As briefed,” Alcasar’s voice came back. “Hold for my takeoff. Clear to rejoin on me once we pass you.”

  Lele clicked her mic switch twice in rapid succession, then looked over at Jack and shook her head. She didn’t dare say anything out loud, lest it later be downloaded from the cockpit voice recorder, but this was without a doubt the most ill-planned op she’d ever participated in. The interplane frequency started blowing up with various elements talking to one another to coordinate not crashing, because nothing had been briefed in enough detail. It was piss-poor planning, and there wasn’t anything she or anyone else could do about it.

  In the middle of these dark thoughts, a blinding flash of light stabbed into her eyes, gaining down her goggles to nothing and causing Jack to let out a swear word she’d never heard from him before.

  “What was that?” he asked, just before another explosion and bright light hit. Lele twisted in her seat as best she could, but all she could make out was the flash of gunfire in the buildings behind her.

  “Locals must be resisting,” she said. “Maybe one of the high-value targets is here. Get ready with that FL—”

  She broke off, then squinted at the heads down display screen in the console that showed the image from her forward looking infrared, or FLIR. On the screen, she could just make out the silhouettes of four figures creeping toward the building in front of her. She blinked and looked up at the painted sign over the door.

  Eskuwela. School. What the . . . ?

  As she watched, one of the men she’d inserted fixed a breaching charge to the door at the short end of the long, low building. She closed her eyes and waited for the explosion, and then opened them in mounting horror. The four figures slipped inside, and the sounds of gunfire soon followed. The FLIR picked up brief flashes through the windows as the team marched, room by room, down the length of the building.

  “Oh no,” Jack said, sounding sick. “No, no . . .” A coppery taste filled Lele’s mouth. She’d bitten through her lip. Blood on her chin, blood on her hands, blood on her thighs . . . Her mind filled up with the red thickness of it, drowned her, pulled her under.

  “Run,” Jack said. His voice on the intercom sounded very faint over the rushing of blood in Lele’s ears. “They’re climbing out of the windows at the far end of the building. Oh my hell, they’re so little! C’mon, kids, run!”

  “Jack,” Lele said, her voice empty as it had been on the approach. Now was not the time to feel. Now was the time to act. She flipped on the force trim, reached up with her left hand to stabilize the cyclic, and drew her service pistol from the holster on her survival vest with the right.

  “Lele! What—?” Jack asked.

  She turned in her seat as much as she could and pointed the gun at his head.

  “Get out,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, sounding hysterical. “Lele, put the gun away! I’m your friend!”

  “That’s why I’m doing this,” she said. The words started to gather more steam as she spoke, as more tiny bodies slipped out of windows and the end door of the building and went running off into the dubious safety of the night. Too bad she and those she’d brought with her could see in the dark.

  “I don’t understand,” Jack said. “Lele—”

  “No. You have a family to go back to. There’s no going back from this. So I am forcing you, at gunpoint, out of my aircraft. Do you hear me? That’s what you tell them. I held a gun to your head and made you get out. Now. Get. Out.”

  Comprehension dawned on his face in the dim glow cast by his goggles. He pressed his lips together, and then nodded once. She kept the gun steady on him as he released the catch on his harness and slipped out of the seat. He looked as if he would say something, but she cut her eyes to the cockpit voice recorder, and he desisted. She watched him unhook his comm cord from his helmet, and then shouted, barely audible over the rotor noise.

  “I’ll get them on board for you! Good Luck, Ma’am!”

  Before she could say anything, he took off running for the school, scooping up small bodies as he ran. Lele held her breath and prayed that the team of killers she’d delivered would remain occupied inside for just a little while longer.

  Jack brought them back by twos and threes, and a tiny detached corner of Lele’s mind wondered how he’d managed to convince the scattering children that he was not to be feared. She kept her head and the FLIR on a swivel as he loaded the aircraft, until a small voice spoke in shaky Tagalog on her interc
om.

  “You will help us?”

  “I will,” she said in the same language, blessing her grandmother for forcing her to learn all those years ago. “Make sure the little ones are sitting down and holding on. And make sure the doors are closed.”

  “Your big man closed them. We are ready.”

  “All right,” she said, as she advanced the throttles from flight idle to military power. The rotor’s beat accelerated in return, getting louder and throwing out more wash. Jack stepped up to the door, saluted, and then stepped back with his hands raised ostentatiously high.

  With no clue what she was doing, Lele switched off her aircraft’s transponder, and pulled the circuit breaker from the panel above her head. Then she pulled in to a hover and swiveled the guns to point at the lone man standing in the field. Then she put the nose down and accelerated up and over the lake. Her best bet was to get out of there as fast as she could, before someone could take off and follow her.

  The rain that she’d earlier cursed had suddenly become her best ally. It started to pour down in heavier sheets, as if the night itself were weeping for the destruction of the little village. Lele flew toward the far slope of the valley, hoping to find a pass below the level of the lurking clouds. She’d thought she’d seen something during that abortion of a briefing yesterday . . .

  There! It wasn’t much, merely a dip in the ridgeline, but she could clearly see the cloud layer above it, thanks to the flames that had started back in the village. She made for the pass, trying not to hear the sounds of the children crying in the cabin behind her.

  “Are you still on comm?” she asked.

  “Yes, lady?” the girl who’d spoken before answered. She didn’t sound very old. Ten at most.

  “What is your name?”

  “Mirabel.”

  “Mirabel. I’m Lele. How old are you?”

  “Eight.”

  Eight years old. You poor baby. What the hell am I doing?

  “Are you the oldest?”

  “Yes. The older ones are gone or dead,” Mirabel said, her voice matter-of-fact and growing steadier by the minute. “We were small enough to get out through the window.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mirabel,” Lele said. “I can’t . . . I am just so sorry. I want to help you, but I . . . I’m not sure where to go.”

  “Can you take us to Mga Yungib?” Mirabel asked. “My parents are hiding there.”

  “The Caves? What Caves?”

  “In the next valley. You are going the right way. Just over this mountain, and then on the backside. It is a long trip by mule, but we are going much faster than a mule can go.”

  “How do you know this? How to get there, where it is?”

  “Everyone knows. When the soldiers come, that is where you must flee, if you can.”

  When the soldiers come. So this has happened before? It wasn’t just a colossal fuck up? What is going on here?

  Lele didn’t really have time to figure it out just then, as they were rapidly approaching that mountain pass. It looked like a solid wall of darkness beyond, which made Lele’s insides clench in fear, but going back was simply not an option. So she dropped down to the level of the trees, slowed her speed significantly, and began picking her way through the mountains. The whole time, she felt as if someone had a weapon pointed at her six, as if she were about to be shot out of the sky at any moment.

  Maybe she was. Even more reason to push forward into the darkness like an insane person. Because, clearly, that’s what she’d become.

  “Mirabel, do you know anything more about where these caves are?” she asked.

  “They told us to come halfway down the mountain, and we would see them in the rock face,” she said.

  “In the rock face? Okay . . .” as the crested the shoulder of the peak, the ambient light decreased dramatically. Lele began to think seriously about finding a place just to land and spend the night, then trying to find these caves in the light of day. The problem, of course, was that if she could see to find them, so could anyone else. And while Alcasar and his Intel buddies might not know to look for a rock face with caves in it, they would most certainly pay attention to a rogue Duey flying around.

  “Missile, missile.” The silky-seductive tones of the Duey’s audio warning system purred in Lele’s ear, while a blinding flash of light gained her goggles down to nothing as the aircraft’s automatic flare dispensers did their thing.

  “Shit!” Lele cursed, and jerked the aircraft into a bank in a last-ditch maneuver to force the threat to miss them. She was low and slow, and didn’t have much energy to work with, so she hauled up on the collective, and prayed that the Duey’s engines would spool quick enough to save their asses.

  The engines shrieked, but delivered. She felt a kick in the seat of her pants, and watched as a corkscrew trail of smoke streaked by them.

  “That’s us!” Mirabel said over the intercom. “The missile came from the caves!”

  “Of course it did,” Lele muttered. “If only we could tell your families not to shoot at . . . ”

  The Loudhailer.

  “Mirabel!” Lele said as she righted the aircraft and brought it back around . . . toward the threat, but she was deliberately not thinking about that at the moment. On this crazy night, what was one more crazy action? The fingers of her collective hand flew across the switches on the overhead console panel, and a shielded green light that she’d almost never seen flipped on. A static hum joined the sound of the rotors and the engines in her ears.

  “Lady?” Mirabel asked, her little voice scared. Lele didn’t even want to think about how much she and the other little ones were being jostled around with her flying.

  “When I say, I need you to talk into your microphone. I need you to call out your parents names, your name. The names of the other children. I need you to tell them that you’re all on this bird, okay? I need you to tell them not to shoot at us, but that we need to land!”

  Lele pulled her nose up and banked the bird over hard to reverse course and head back toward the cliff face and whoever it was that had launched the missile at them.

  “Okay, lady,” Mirabel said, sounding doubtful. Lele nearly laughed, because she felt the same way.

  “Now, Mirabel!” she said, and hit the “broadcast” switch on the loudhailer.

  “Mama, papa! It’s Mirabel! And Baby, and Angel, and Rizal, and Arvin, and . . . ”

  Lele felt the words of a half-remembered prayer slip through her lips as she flew closer, and closer to the cliff. With every second, her options for evading another shot decreased, but she flew on, putting her faith in a God she didn’t think existed . . . and in the sing-song sound of a child’s voice.

  Lightning cracked overhead, and rain continued to pour down, but the mountain stayed still. Unsure of what else to do, Lele slowed, feeding in power, and coming to a hover over the dark-shrouded jungle canopy that covered the slope.

  A light appeared below, then another. Lele slewed the FLIR over to look, and saw several figures moving in the trees ahead. As she watched, they appeared to roll the canopy back, as if it were nothing but a curtain. Underneath, a wide, open field beckoned invitingly.

  “Mirabel, tell them that if they want us to land there, they should move the two lights together, and then separate them by the width of a house.” Lele didn’t know how wide a typical house was, but she figured that that amount of separation should be enough for her to see and respond appropriately.

  The little girl relayed this instruction, and sure enough, the two lights came together, and then split apart. From her hover approximately a hundred feet above the ground (and maybe twenty feet above the level of the surrounding trees), Lele started her approach. By the time she felt her skids touch the spongy surface of the field, she was certain that this whole thing must be a dream. Had she really just done all of that?

  Unable to think of anything else to do, she cut the engines and let the rotor idle to a stop. As soon as the blades stopped turning, a wo
man broke through the crowd gathered in the treeline and sprinted toward the aircraft.

  “Mirabel!” the woman cried, her arms outstretched. In the light from the torches that had been used to mark the impromptu LZ, Lele could see tearmarks that glistened down the woman’s face.

  “Mama!” the little girl cried from the back, and Lele felt a series of thumps and clangs as the child fought free of the seatbelt that Jack had cinched around her and two others. With that same sense of dreamlike unreality, Lele unstrapped herself and opened the door of the Duey. The woman had been joined by four or five more people, presumably parents of the children inside. They cried their children’s names and pounded on the plexiglass windows of the bird in their haste.

  “Move back,” Lele said in Tagalog. “Let me open the door.”

  The parents fell silent and turned to stare at her. Lele couldn’t imagine what they must think. Here she was, helmeted, armed, wearing a UN uniform and insignia, and yet she spoke Tagalog, and had brought their children to them. She stepped up to the door, and tugged on the old-fashioned style handle, then slid the door back to let the crying children spill out into their parents’ arms.

  The kids’ voices tumbled all over one another as they each related the tale as they’d experienced it. First one, than another, then several more adults let out shrieks and heartrending wails of denial as they learned that their children hadn’t been among the ones she’d rescued.

  Lele watched for a moment, safe behind the shield of her helmet and night vision goggles, and then turned to go back to the cockpit. Accompanied only by the familiar ache of loss, she climbed back into her seat and completed the shutdown sequence.

  When she was finished, she removed her helmet and hung it on the hook above her seat. Then she took a moment to retie her hair back into a neat bun before stepping out of the aircraft again.