by Tom Kratman
A radio transmission came in from one of the spotters, since there still was no indication the smurfs had caught on to the blocked radio frequencies. According to Carlos, that had bought many victories for guerilla fighters all over Cienfuegos. The ability to coordinate strikes and plans over long distances had made many things possible, including getting enough men together for this attack.
“The villa is on fire, the front porch was destroyed by the blast, we are attacking the gate now,” the unknown fighter said in Spanish. Tom noted that his own understanding of Spanish was becoming at least somewhat tolerable. Sounds of battle came over the radio before it shut off, but the fight was apparently brief, if rather fierce. The compound had only a skeleton crew, just enough to ensure sailors taking advantage of Constancia’s pleasures stayed under some level of control . . . and to load the huánuco far away from prying eyes. More would probably have risked too many people knowing about that particular detail.
The radio squawked again. “The officer is severely wounded, but alive. Most of the guards are dead. We have wounded, and Juan is dead. We got them all before they could get to the shuttle. I don’t know if they got a message out to their ship, but there is no activity in the air yet.”
It would take the orbiting ship time to prepare a landing craft, Tom knew, even if the enemy managed to get off a communication before the ambush. That much he had been able to locate in the manuals he’d downloaded.
Carlos’s voice was cold. “Enrique, have them bring me Cranston. Luis, go cut us a stake. Maybe fifteen feet long. Jose . . . we’re going to need a hole dug. A few feet deep, no more. And narrow.” His eyes were red, a mixture of sadness and rage in them, and he blinked back the water. They were fixed upon the officer’s shocked face, still frozen on the tablet’s display. A murderous grin wormed its way across his conflicted features.
“And Jose, get some shorter stakes too, to fill in the space between the pole and the edges,” Carlos added, walking out behind his men. Elena was there, a look of wicked satisfaction crossing her youthful features. She smiled cruelly and knowingly at David, her expression appreciative, almost promising, before following her father out the door. David tried to smile in turn, probably to impress her, but it was a hollow thing. Even Tom could tell that much.
Cranston could hear before he could see. When he opened his eyes, he found himself staring into the face of a smiling Carlos. Terrible fear overcame him, and he heard a sickening moan a moment before realizing it was his own. Wetness stained his crotch and an ammonia stink filled his nostrils.
“Ah! Que tal?” Carlos said happily, patting the lieutenant on the shoulder. That brought the pain of his injuries to the forefront. His legs were bent wrong. There was shock from dozens of small cuts all over. His uniform was tattered. Adrenaline surged through his system and fought with the omnipresent pain for his attention. The huánuco high hadn’t yet fully receded, and his heartbeat raced faster and faster. A grinning fighter was holding a large hammer. Behind him, another man was humming cheerfully as he sharpened the stake . . .
Enrique and the rest of the men seemed almost disappointed to wait on the duo, like they wanted to be a part of what was going to happen outside.
Half an hour later, enough to retrieve the man and bring him to Carlos’s villa, it began. Screams and terrifying pleas could be heard. There was a pounding sound, and then more screams, each higher and more terrible than the last. More pounding. More screams and pleas.
Enrique offered Tom the rum bottle that was making the celebratory rounds, and he cheerfully took a pull from it. He found he was even starting to like it, in a weird sort of way.
The screams gave way to very peculiar moans. Tom found they no longer bothered him. If the officer had done even one-tenth of what Elena claimed, or even the village prostitutes had claimed, it was a dose of drone-guided karma.
Once social media was abuzz with news of the Cienfuegos Drone Bombing, he uploaded the Papa Smurf meme he’d been working on. In it, the high admiral was too busy fucking Smurfette from behind to notice a little drone making a “shhhhh” gesture as it snuck behind the pair to blow up a bunch of drunken, drug-addled, half-naked smurfs.
That ought to piss someone off, he thought. The view count went through the roof. There were even a handful of shares. The comments, of course, were even more interesting. One stood out in particular:
“Maybe they should stop fucking once in a while and start doing their duty. That way we wouldn’t have to die for their deviant shit.” It had been posted anonymously, and the share count was small, for nobody wanted to be identified agreeing with that sentiment. But the view count was extremely high for that, too.
Their memes were producing sympathetic posts, finally. They were getting somewhere.
If High Admiral Hortzmann had been angry before, he was clearly furious now. Pamela felt the anger more literally, as the high admiral flogged her. She was cuffed to the bed, her naked body presented for his pleasure. For hours, he took her, abused her, and angrily finished upon her. Her screams were very real, this time, and not merely for effect. He was pissed.
Finally, the blows stopped, and the high admiral was fully spent. This time, he had actually drawn a fair amount of blood. It dripped down her battered buttocks.
“A terrorist steals one of our drones and blows up your man, shoots the rest, and you have nothing for me? Too busy doing that fucking alien cocaine shit?” He demanded, sitting down beside her. Usually, there would be a tender moment after such a scene, a moment of after care, where if he didn’t whisper any soft words to her, he at least stroked her body gently, let her come down from her masochistic high. There was none of that now. This wasn’t punishment for pleasure, it was punishment for its own sake.
“Sir,” she straightened up, trying to ignore the pain flaring up from her destroyed posterior, “that’s not true. I told you, I do have something. Maybe not much, but something.”
She took his silence as an invitation to continue. “I checked the incoming manifests, and I did find something interesting, two American developers picked up in Mexico several months ago. They were delivered to Cienfuegos, in fact to the very village where the attack occurred. Furthermore, we have discovered that one of our IT personnel may have had his user account hacked somehow. Obviously, he has been suspended from duty pending investigation.”
“So, you still have no idea where they are, or how they are doing this?” The high admiral stroked his flogger briefly for effect.
“That’s not necessarily true. I have a suspicion. No proof, but a suspicion . . . Sir, I will handle it. I’ll get this contained. Please give me a chance.” She begged and pleaded with him.
The high admiral stood up and began to dress himself. Pamela knew better than to dress herself in his presence, she would have to wait until he was gone. He turned to her.
“Do what you need to do, Captain. I expect this to be wrapped up when I see you again. Next time it will go much worse for you.” The last part was unnecessary. Pamela knew there would be no next time. She would be shipped back to Earth in disgrace, or worse. Especially if the high admiral found out why her men had been bombed. Pamela was pretty sure he at least vaguely suspected her drug habit wasn’t the only thing she did with the stuff. And while officially it was highly illegal, it was also unofficially a common practice. Some, she knew, had even smuggled weapons to the guerillas operating on the planet. Those were severely disciplined when discovered. But drugs? Sexual deviancy? A little slavery on the side? These were minor trifles. Mere nothings.
At least, they were trifles until they caused official notice. Then they became an embarrassment, and that could not be tolerated.
The entire operation was going to have to go away, she realized. Her whole scheme to escape from under the thumb of the high admiral, from having to serve her supposed betters, was up in smoke. The drug money that would have freed her from her duty was forever out of reach, now. But there might still be time to salvage what s
he still had, to at least prevent being shipped back to Earth in disgrace. Or worse, killed by disappointed dealers back on Earth.
Maybe. She didn’t like her odds. She didn’t even have the men to do the job right, and she couldn’t lean on the high admiral for the right sort of men. The risks were too great.
A smile wormed its way across Tom’s features. “Time for one last prank, I think, before we go off the grid.” Carlos had demanded their tablets be shut off when they evacuated. There was a certain genre savviness to that. Even though it was trivial for David to cut connection and disable the network adapters on both tablets, Carlos was taking no chances they might be tracked. Tom supposed they should both be grateful that Carlos’s gratitude extended to taking them with him when he fled the village.
Still, time enough remained for one last gag. David nodded knowingly.
“It’ll be a gas, man. They’ll never get rid of it.”
Tom tried not to laugh, but it was funny, given the joke. “Seriously, man? That’s what you came up with?” He tapped the upload command, and the worm Tom had written found its way into the Angela Merkel’s ship-to-ship comm system, where it would lay dormant for a while, waiting to do its work. It was their parting gift to the smurfs in the sky. If they ever rid themselves of it without a complete reformatting of every solid-state drive on the whole ship, he’d be very surprised. It was, in many ways, their masterwork.
They would probably never create its like again.
Both programmers were pleased to see that the entire social media feed of the occupation force had been effectively shut down, for it was evidence that their campaign had worked. Before that, he had posted long screeds about how the high admiral and the captain of the Angela Merkel were in cahoots with a drug smuggling operation full of murder, rape, and intrigue, and the common sailors were the ones paying the tab when the terrorist bombs exploded.
It wasn’t entirely accurate. Most of those who died in the bombing and the subsequent attack had thoroughly deserved it. But the resulting shitstorm on social media had been worthwhile. The mood of the occupiers was souring greatly. Some were irritated at being caught, and a few of the better (and more naïve) ones were angry at being used this way. Tom had no idea how he could objectively measure demoralization, but it was working.
That the high admiral had ordered all nonessential network usage shut down entirely had driven home just how bad this was starting to look for him. And that, too, would have a cascade effect. The entertainment network (along with its more unsavory varieties of entertainment) had been shut down along with the rest. That too was likely to cause demoralization and outrage, as much for the elimination of porn on the network as for anything else.
Even with the UN restrictions on “sexist objectification,” porn continued to be the primary bandwidth sink on Terra Novan occupation networks. Or at least it had been. Topping off a campaign of memetic warfare with a bombing that ended with a corrupt lieutenant getting executed Vlad the Impaler style had really changed things.
“Time to go.” Carlos was polite but firm, looking down at the tablets. Tom and David shut them off and dropped them into their bags.
Tom took a last look around the villa. He’d miss the cool fountain waters, piped in via a small wooden aqueduct, he’d learned. Quite ingenious. Carlos, of course, had shrugged it off. “My own ancestors,” he had explained, “had done much more with much less two thousand years ago.” But the coolness of it, the fresh, clean mountain water, that would be missed. He felt he was leaving civilization for a second time.
And still no choice in the matter, he mused. But at least it all meant something. At least my work wasn’t flushed down a bureaucratic toilet or wasted on idiots. He was pretty sure most of the code he’d written for the UN back on Earth was wasted. Written because some bureaucrat wanted something and thrown away when he was replaced with another. How many half-completed projects had been cancelled? How many useless applications had he written that nobody would ever use? But not here. For good or ill, his worked had accomplished something.
“I’d almost felt like we were back in civilization.” Tom said, looking wistfully at David.
David nodded. But soon his attention wandered to Elena. After the bombing, even Carlos didn’t appear to mind David doting on his daughter. He even seemed to encourage it. I suppose a woman could do much worse than a geek-turned-guerrilla on Terra Nova, Tom thought. The rotting, impaled corpse of Lieutenant Cranston still stuck plainly in the front yard attested to that well enough. It was still very dangerous, but he supposed if David was serious enough, and didn’t do anything particularly stupid, it might be a good match.
And so, Enrique was the one who answered him instead. “We are civilized, señor. This is why we didn’t cut you up for bait. That is why your friend is still alive even though he makes eyes at the boss’s daughter. Very civilized.” The enforcer gave him a friendly pat on the back and laughed. It nearly pushed him to the ground. Enrique had a bad habit of forgetting his own relative strength. Even now, Tom wasn’t sure he was joking. “Here, in case we meet those who are not civilized.” The enforcer handed over a small belt with a nine millimeter holstered in it.
“I don’t know how to use one. They banned them in America when I was a kid and . . .” Tom protested
“You will learn. This world is a good teacher. I will help, too.” Enrique replied, waving it off as if it was nothing. His English was much improved, much as Tom’s own Spanish had gotten better. He nodded and trudged off into the jungle.
Captain Pamela Andego stood to her full five foot, eleven inch height and looked down on the lowly petty officer. “Let me get this straight, you took an order via e-mail? How fucking retarded are you?” Her anger was such that she didn’t even self-censor the breach in political protocol. One never uttered unapproved words. Or at least, so the political manuals said. In practice, Petty Officer Samuel Ellis was hardly in a position to complain.
Ellis gulped and tried not to make eye contact with his superior.
“Get out of my office. Consider yourself relieved of duty and confined to quarters.” Pamela dismissed the idiot.
At least, she reflected, they had an idea of what was going on now, and why resistance guerrillas had been so maddeningly effective on Cienfuegos lately. They had been able to coordinate via radio without any chance of interception or triangulation for months. The disappearance of Carlos, his associates, and any trace of the two programmers on the manifest further confirmed it had to be them behind both the bombing and the network security breaches. It all made sense, finally.
She glared at the picture her men had sent of the villa. It was burning. Her people had seen to that quickly. There would be no happy homecomings for Carlos. But the image of Cranston’s fly-covered body staked out in front of the burning structure, the arms and legs dangling in unnatural ways, was seared into her mind forever.
In truth, I can’t blame Carlos for hating us, she admitted to herself. What we did was wrong, and there’s no getting around that.
Just as the high admiral had certain tastes, so did many underneath her. A former drug lord had his uses even in a primitive, barbaric place like Cienfuegos. But he had to be broken to his role as she had been to hers. Cranston had been useful for that much, at least.
I just didn’t expect Slade to go so far, she thought. He was supposed to have a little fun, maybe even . . . but even as she thought it, it felt wrong. No, she had known who Cranston was, what he might do, even back then. That was all part of breaking Carlos.
There’s something to that, she thought, we’re all trying to escape somebody else’s control. No, she couldn’t quite bring herself to hate Carlos. She would have done the same in his place. Indeed, she had been tempted many times on general principle.
But the idiots back home had seen fit to drop two thoroughly unvetted, well-equipped nerds into Carlos’s lap, and everything had gone straight to shit. It was like the whole universe was trying to screw her, not ju
st the high admiral. The exotic drug money she’d never get, the pissed off dealers back home when she didn’t deliver . . . She wasn’t sure if she could even return to Earth now, if she didn’t deliver on her promises. Duty in Terra Novan orbit was probably the safest place to be at the moment, if she could keep it.
On social media, the damage was enough that the high admiral himself had locked down all nonessential network services and blocked the noncritical outgoing data packets to Earth. Even private letters had been completely stopped and that wasn’t doing morale any favors. Memes had been going viral, and even her own men looked at her with barely restrained contempt now. Some, of course, looked rather more lustily. It was maddening to know that everyone in the whole fleet knew what you looked like naked.
At least now they could track the radio transmissions again. That was something. There would be payment in full for the embarrassment she had suffered. Her dreams of promotion and an idle vacation life were gone, but she could at least get even. Carlos may have reason to hate her, but if he had possessed the wisdom to do as he was told, none of this would have happened in the first place.
Pamela got up and headed for the bridge, knowing what had to be done, but dreading the terrible risk.
She turned to her XO as she entered. “I need two shuttles prepped for immediate launch. Get me twenty of our best men, most experienced on the ground. Open up the arms locker and have Security outfit them.”
“Ma’am?”
“Just do it. Coordinates are in your station. Sweep the area, engage from the air before landing. Orders are to secure the area and eliminate any local resistance. Shuttle One is to provide close air support while Shuttle Two lands. Then both shuttles are to remain on station after the away team has landed.” This was a bad idea, she knew, but she had to throw the dice anyway.