Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  “We don’t have any Marines, ma’am,” the XO protested, his voice strained. “We’re not even well equipped with small arms and . . . ”

  “Carlos and his terrorists are down there. We need to resolve the situation now,” she ordered, cutting him off. Not all of her crew were in on the smuggling, but her XO was. He could be trusted within limits. “We’re going to need to carefully select the away team. Only the best.”

  He gulped visibly and nodded, understanding the implications. His career was as dead as hers if this wasn’t cleaned up. And on her ship, very few officers were selected from the diversity rosters, something which had earned her more than a little concern from home office. It served her well now. Her people weren’t stupid, at least, and that had to count for something.

  Maybe she had a chance to salvage this ratfuck after all.

  They had trudged through the jungle for days until they came to the mouth of a small cave, where Carlos and his men had evidently hidden a cache of supplies and weapons. Shuttles and drones had been spotted all over the area. There were even sailors trudging through the jungle. Some of those had regretted the assignment. Carlos’s men were quick in their grisly work.

  Enrique was instructing them on how to make use of their weapons, and how to stay silent enough in the jungle. There were few enough rounds, and far too little time, so little that Enrique could not give them even a remote fraction of the training they really needed, especially given the need for relative quiet. But he gave them what he could. It was better than nothing. Probably.

  “Be careful of the slide, señores,” he said, pulling it back. “If you grip it too high the slide could cut your hand when you fire, like this.” The top of his hand touched the slide as he drew it back. “Two hands, if you can, like this.” He aimed the weapon toward the bright cave entrance.

  David emulated the stance confidently. Elena laughed, watching David trying to impress her. He looked ridiculous, like he was pretending to be a secret agent from some B-rate flick. “Don’t close your eyes when you shoot,” she teased.

  He holstered the weapon and turned to her, grinning from ear to ear. “Trust me, I won’t.”

  Tom rolled his eyes at the innuendo. He checked the safety and holstered his own weapon, the lesson over. It hadn’t become second nature, but it was something he could do with some thought, now. Watching Carlos, worry crossed his features. The smurf captain was clearly on the hunt for them, and everybody knew it.

  “It was never like this.” Carlos mused. There were nods and murmurs of agreement from his men. “I knew killing Cranston would get her attention, but not this way. I don’t understand why she is using sailors to hunt us on the ground. They are the wrong men to send. It’s all wrong.”

  “It’s the huánuco,” Tom explained. “With all that we’ve done, she’s gotta be feeling the heat from her boss. So, she needs to make it all go away on her own. Keep her nose clean with the high admiral. She can’t use anybody else. Only her own crew, loyal to her.”

  Carlos shook his head. “The pitufos don’t care about the smuggling. They all do it.”

  “True,” Tom replied. “But in her case, it’s a political embarrassment. It’s one thing to do it. It’s another thing to get caught and embarrass your bosses. If there is one thing Earth politicians hate more than anything, it’s that. They’ll come down on the high admiral, and he’ll come down hard on the captain if she’s caught. This could shake up the whole command structure up there.”

  “Come down on her . . . probably literally.” David agreed, laughing.

  “Probably not even that, Dave.” Taking a puff from his last cigar, Tom continued. “Things are fucked up on Earth. I mean, in the old days they’d never have sent us here for a mere overstayed visa. They are consolidating power. Getting rid of people they don’t want around. Anybody that gets in the way of that . . . well if the captain is caught and sent back home, she’ll seriously regret it. If they even let her live. And that huánuco has gotta go through someone’s hands. Those folks won’t be happy either.”

  Carlos drew his finger in a throat-slitting motion. “Si. They will not be happy. May even be some people I used to know.” He smiled at that. “If we can get her sent home, maybe she dies.”

  “Mind if I ask a personal question, sir?” Tom asked. Carlos merely nodded his assent.

  “Why did they exile you? Why did you try to get out of the drug trade?”

  Carlos’s expression fell. “It was brutal. Uncivilized. Rivals killing whole families to send a message. I lost my wife to them. It nearly broke us. Then the pitufos came and stole most of my land. No, I was done with all that. Coming here was the only way I could get away from all that. Otherwise walking away from the business would have been fatal.”

  Tom was incredulous. “You volunteered to come here?”

  “Si,” Carlos began. “and for a while it was good. Our ancestors were Romans, once upon a time, you know. We could build great things, given the time, if they left us alone. That little aqueduct back in my house? That was my idea. Something I read in a history book once. But then the captain found out who I was, figured I could be useful to her, growing product for her to sell to buy her own freedom from her smurf commanders. And then, just like the other petty drug lords back on Earth, her man went after my family. I realized I had no choice but to fight this time.”

  Silence reigned in the cave for a while. Nobody had a good reply to that. The last cigars were extinguished. The rum remained, for Enrique had seen to it that the cave was well stocked. “Every man has priorities,” he said in Spanish as he broke open the first bottle. Evidently those priorities included liquor but didn’t include much in the way of decent food. While he might have been fine with the stale, over-baked bread, Tom certainly wasn’t.

  The sun began to set, the cave growing dark. A tiny fire was lit, far inside the cave and out of sight from the jungle itself. Tom watched the guerrillas tear into their meager rations and realized for the first time that he probably looked a lot like them now. He was armed and dressed in their same haphazard homespun camouflage. Oh, he didn’t have the scars and their rough looks, but he was likewise a killer, now.

  He put the finishing touches on the remote detonator he had constructed with his tablet. They could trigger the device from David’s tablet, synced over a wireless band not used by the occupation force. It would allow them to get a video feed from the bomb itself and detonate it at exactly the right moment.

  “Done,” Tom pronounced, running his last test. “When we turn it on, it will attempt to connect to the UN network again. They’ll be able to triangulate it easy. If the smurfs are dumb enough, they might take the bait.”

  Tom tried not to think of his only lifeline to technology finally being severed. David had agreed to share his own tablet after they expended Tom’s, but . . . it wasn’t going to be the same.

  Cut the cord, he thought, that’s what they used to say, back when everything was wired. I guess it’s time. Not like any of us have a choice. It’s about the only way to get even odds of survival in this shitstorm.

  A hushed conversation in Spanish took place in the corner, and Enrique’s voice could be heard above the others. “Si,” Enrique said, poking another one of Carlos’s men and pointing to the two programmers. “They are getting better. I don’t think we have to slit their throats in their sleep.” He smiled genially at them. This time, Tom was confident they were joking.

  Pretty sure, anyway.

  “Tomorrow,” Carlos announced, “we will split up. They will find us here eventually.” He looked toward his daughter, who was laughing at some joke David had told. There was worry for her there, not for her increasing closeness to David, for Carlos seemed to approve of the budding relationship on some level, but for her survival. Save for revenge against the captain, little else seemed to exist anymore. He’d won and lost two fortunes, been powerful and been at the mercy of others. Carlos was a man who had seen it all, and it showed in the tired, w
orried expression he wore. “We have to end this. Draw the captain’s men out and kill them. Be done with it.”

  He nodded to himself, looked at David and smiled, some decision apparently made. He turned to face Thomas. “You will come with us. In case we need . . .” He laughed. “. . . technical support with the bomb.”

  Great, Tom thought, now suddenly David is more valuable because Elena likes him. I get to be shot at instead.

  He cast a death glare David’s way. David, of course, was hardly paying attention.

  Tom ducked lower behind the thick tree trunk, his belly hugging the ground. David’s tablet was in his hand. He gave silent thanks to the Lord that it hadn’t been damaged.

  There were shouts. The sailors, probably, he thought. The shouts weren’t in Spanish. The guerillas, on the other hand, were silent. Stealthy. And apparently not as stupid as the pitufos were. He tried not to think about what would happen if Carlos and his men lost this fight. Video played out on the tablet’s screen. A curious and somewhat dull-looking face loomed into view, inspecting the tablet. The detonator and the bomb itself had been carefully buried underneath. Still, whoever this sailor was, he was none too bright. Tom considered that killing him was probably doing the gene pool a favor. He zoomed in to the nametag. Ellis, the tag read. Tom laughed silently at the irony, knowing exactly how the flunky had drawn this duty that was about to get him killed.

  Tom chuckled to himself. Carlos’s crazy-ass plan is actually going to work, he thought. Another pair of men walked into view of the video feed as the curious sailor picked it up. There were exclamations from the others, warnings to drop it and run. Tom thumbed the remote detonator.

  The explosion was deafening, even from far away. Carlos had used far more explosives than the drone bomb had possessed, since there were no weight limits this time. Pieces of jungle, men, and equipment blew out everywhere. Wetness impacted the back of his skull, and for a moment he was taken with the irrational fear that it was blood. His blood. The fact that he was still capable of thought dispelled that notion. But blood it still was. Probably.

  Muffled gunfire was everywhere, suddenly. He tried to make himself smaller, hoping that the Lord, and a fair amount of luck, would protect him. The rest was up to Carlos. It was his ambush and there was little else he could do. But he reassured himself that the nine millimeter was still on his hip, and he slid it out gently, holding it out in his right hand. He reached to secure the tablet in his bag.

  If the Lord didn’t see fit to protect him, he’d just have to do it himself. He shuffled slowly forward, still hugging the ground.

  David’s tablet, and their last link to the world he knew, shattered in a shower of plastic, glass, and metal that cut his hand deeply. Gunfire was all around him. He had a momentary vision of one of Carlos’s men twisting to the ground, the top portion of his head erased in a shower of gore.

  Tom couldn’t see the man’s killer but fired in the direction he assumed the shot had come from. For a moment the gunfire slackened. Intense concentration filled his awareness, and he prayed that the camouflage Carlos had given him was doing its job. He rolled into the bushes and waited.

  Soon, he saw them. Sailors cautiously advancing on his position. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. A miss. And another miss. The third round winged one of them. The rifles were pointing toward him.

  Shit, shit.

  Then one of the sailors was torn to shreds in front of him, gunfire coming from everywhere. The man spun around, rounds impacting him everywhere. The other hit the ground quickly.

  Carlos was behind him. “I told you to keep down and be quiet!” He whispered.

  “I was quiet . . .” Tom whispered back, protesting.

  “I am surprised they couldn’t hear you from orbit, the way you move.” Carlos answered. But his tone was not angry. To the contrary, it was genial. The sailors were retreating, finally. “You fought well, though. For a noisy gringo.”

  “Sir,” the XO interrupted Pamela’s thoughts. “Got something here. Backtracking the area around the ambush and look at this.” He transferred the image to her screen.

  Angela Merkel’s visual tracking covered far too much ground for even the computers to be all that useful in tracking ground movements in real-time throughout an entire jungle. But once narrowed down to a specific area, it was possible to backtrack movements in the video history. She caught the hints of movement beneath the trees butting up against the mountain, identified by the computer as anomalous now that the zone had been sufficiently narrowed.

  She might have lost most of her men in the ambush, she knew. But there was still a chance. She stared at the cave, and the brief flicker of movement that came out of it hours before the ambush.

  She’d lost at least ten already, in addition to those murdered the day before, and she had no idea how many men Carlos had left. Explaining this to the high admiral was already going to be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. The sailors had fallen back to the shuttle, and once the shuttle’s weapons could be trained, the guerillas had backed off. Desperate requests for orders came in.

  “Get our people out of there,” she ordered. “Redirect here. Attack the cave.”

  She was reminded of the fact that these men were not marines.

  “Shuttle Two isn’t responding anymore, ma’am. I think they’ve turned off their coms.” Yet it was still raising from the ground, heading out of the atmosphere back toward the Angela Merkel.

  Yeah, that figures, she thought, they want to get out of there while the getting is good. So, someone probably put a round through the radio. And the wireless network, too. Sorry, ma’am, a lot of bullets were flying around. Must’ve hit ’em. Not our fault, ma’am. No, we didn’t hear the order to attack, no ma’am.

  Guilt gnawed at her awareness. People were dying everywhere, and for what? So that she could keep her post and continue to be a servant? A plaything? It had all gone too far. And now they were deliberately ignoring her. The situation was spiraling out of her control, and she slammed her fist down on the command chair. There was one last die to cast. Maybe if she could present the terrorist’s head to the high admiral, she could save something of her career. If he’d left his family in the cave, perhaps an exchange could be arranged. One soon-to-be-dead Carlos for one daughter.

  “Get shuttle One over there, then. I want prisoners.” It was her last chance.

  Fucking hell, she thought. I’m so screwed. I’m so fucking screwed. There’s no fucking way this is going to work, but what else can I do?

  She watched the icons on her display as the anxiety ate at her. Her console pinged. The high admiral was calling, but there was no time. Nothing she could say. It was do or die, now. She found herself going through the same excuses her men had probably played out. No sir, the comms were damaged by the hackers. It took a few hours to fix, sir. No, sorry sir, I didn’t get your call . . .

  Elena and David both shared a common misery. Neither was out there, killing smurfs. If Elena was resigned to it, for her father was stern in his desire to keep her safe, David was adamant that he should have gone. His friend was out there, he knew, and though Tom had always been the troublemaker and rabble rouser, it wasn’t right that he was here, safe and sound, while Tom was risking his life with the bomb.

  Enrique looked quite satisfied with the way things had gone. “Better in here than dead,” he said simply. He was never a man for futile heroics.

  An explosion sounded off in the distance, followed by echoing gunfire. The ambush had begun. The fighting was sporadic, and none of the three left in the cave had any idea who was winning until one of the shuttles blasted for the sky at high speed.

  “I think our people just won, if I had to guess.” David said.

  Elena smiled, and David somehow managed the courage to put his arm around her. She was like much of Terra Nova, he reflected, beautiful and dangerous in equal measure. Behind him, Enrique chuckled.

  “Took you long enough, gringo.” He sa
id pleasantly. “She’s been leading you on for months.”

  Elena leaned her head on his shoulder and glared briefly at the burly enforcer. It was a glare that could have cut steel. Enrique clamped shut. But then she smiled happily again. David was struck by two notions in that moment. First, that this was a woman with a temper that could melt iron and was probably exceedingly dangerous to court. And second, that he didn’t give a shit. He was going to do it anyway.

  For perhaps the very first time, he was grateful to be here.

  The whoosh of a turbine engine blasted above them, suddenly, with loose dirt shifting down from the cave’s ceiling.

  “Coño!” Enrique cursed. “Down, down!”

  He practically pushed them deeper in the cave and ducked behind a bend in the cave himself, shouldering his rifle. “How the fuck did they find us?”

  David spared a glance upward. He had his suspicions, but there was no time. He flicked the safety and pulled the slide back, putting a round in the chamber. Elena was protesting behind him, saying that she had more experience shooting than he did. But he didn’t give a shit about that, either. He was going to fight anyway. The iron glare returned, and he turned to Enrique, still feeling the heat of that stare upon him. Carlos’s enforcer nodded, a newfound respect in his eyes.

  Enrique gestured him to one side of the cave and David followed.

  The sailors were quick. Probably, some part of David’s brain realized, they aren’t the same ones who just got their asses kicked. Those would surely possess more sense.

  Everything slowed, and yet it was over so quickly. David had only the briefest sense of it all, even though it felt like forever as it happened. He was hunched down, most the way behind an edge in the cave that he knew was dark, Enrique’s backup should anything go wrong. The shuttle landed in front of the cave mouth, its weapons trained inward. They had fallen back out of reach. Hopefully the sailors weren’t just going to casually blast the mountain out from under them.