War World X: Takeover

by John F. Carr

  We’d been warned, kind of. The summer before, a rumor swept the reservations all over the United States, that the government was going to start taking over and selling Indian lands and relocating reservation Indians.

  Ten years earlier, hardly anyone would have taken a rumor like that seriously. But in 2172, the Soviets had begun rounding up some of the Turkic and Mongol peoples in Asia and relocating them by force to a world called Haven. It was scary to read about.

  The CoDominium Bureau of Relocation had been sending immigrants to Haven for years, and once, out of curiosity, I’d read up on the planet. Not in the newsfax, but in technical journals. Haven sounded like a bad place.

  Some tribes, the Mesaderos and Navajos among others, had set up unofficial committees of resistance. Not that we thought it would really happen, but just in case. Hideouts were built or dug in, in hidden places in canyons and forests, and supplies were hidden in them. It was to one of those that Lemmi was driving us.

  We were the first ones to reach it. It was two hogans topped with a foot of dirt and twenty inches of snow, on one side of a shallow draw, shaded by pines and firs. The hogans would be hard to see from the air, with the naked eyes. Maybe an instrument search would show them.

  Until that day there’d only been a rumor, and the Navajo Reservation hadn’t seemed like the place where the government would start. The Navajos were the strongest and most populous tribe and most of their land was poor. The White Mountain and Mescalero reservations had much better land. And the Nez Perce; even the Pine Ridge. I suppose the government decided that if they took the strongest first, and relocated its people, the other tribes would lose heart and do what they were told. I used to wonder if that’s how it worked out.

  Within forty minutes there were ten of us in the two hogans. Everyone but me had clothes stored there, and boots, and a rifle. I was lucky to have worn boots that morning instead of oxfords; the weather forecast had given me that. And two of the pickups had rifles racked in them, so there was one for me. I didn’t know who I would worry with an old .30 caliber Winchester hunting rifle. Two infantry riflemen had more firepower than the ten of us.

  Of course, the idea wasn’t to get in fights anyway. It was to make little armed demonstrations, get on the television and in the newsfax, and get the American people on our side. That had been the strategy of the Indian rights movement for more than a century. But the government was paying less and less attention to the people.

  It stopped snowing that night. Meanwhile the government had shut down all the tribal radio stations and Navajo language programs on other stations, and banned any mention of what was happening. We tuned in Gallup, Flagstaff, Farmington, and Holbrook, and they never mentioned that anything was going on.

  The guys I was with talked it over. They decided to sit tight and take it a day at a time. If we didn’t hear anything tonight, maybe we’d send out pickups in the morning to visit the nearest groups. Maybe we could work something out.

  No one asked my opinion; I wasn’t Navajo. I wasn’t any kind of Apache—any of the Dinneh, or Tindeh…the people in the Apache languages. I was originally from the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, where the country was soggy muskeg instead of timbered mountains or rough, stony desert. I’d married a Mescalero, learned the language, and done my Ph.D. research on them. Also I spoke pretty good Navajo. But I wasn’t really one of them. Not then. I even had enough European genes to give me hazel eyes. But if they had asked my opinion, I’d have gone along with what they thought best. I had nothing myself to suggest. I was no chief then. I was an educator.

  As it turned out, the army came to us, at about 3:30 in the morning. I suppose their instruments picked up the heat from our stovepipes, even though we kept very small fires. They’d have taken us entirely by surprise, except that I had awakened and had to urinate, so I pulled on my boots and went out of the hogan. And heard the soft, rumbling hum of landing craft settling into a meadow in the woods—what the Spanish and Anglos in the southwest call a cienega—a hundred or so meters down slope. I went into both hogans and woke everyone up.

  We fooled them; we fought. It seemed unreal then that we’d do that. It seemed unreal to the army, too; that’s why we did as well as we did. Some of us didn’t even take time to lace our boots, just wrapped the laces around our ankles. The others strapped on snowshoes and went down the draw toward the cienega. I didn’t have snowshoes; I just waded along the best I could in other people’s tracks.

  The troops were in no hurry. They were still in the cienega. They’d unloaded from the two light landers, I guess a platoon of them, and were forming up to move on us.

  None of us had a night scope, of course, but the soldiers weren’t wearing camouflage whites, and there was moonlight. With the snow cover, it was easy to see them. But it was too dark to use the sights on our rifles. We just aimed down the tops of our barrels and started to shoot from behind trees. We had time to shoot two or three rounds each before they started shooting back, but when they did, it was the most frightening thing in my life, before or since. It sounded like four hundred rifles instead of forty. I could hear bullets hitting tree trunks and rocks, and branches falling off the trees above and behind us. They fired for about half a minute, I guess.

  Then they stopped, and started moving forward. Someone said later that they’d gotten orders through headphones in their helmets. They were to take us prisoner if they could and they thought they’d intimidated us; thought we were ready to quit, and I was. One or two of our people started shooting again though, so the soldiers did too, and then the rest of us did. I shot two or three times more before Lemmi yelled to cease fire and surrender. After a few seconds, the soldiers stopped shooting again, too. They came up and arrested all of us. A few started to beat us with their rifle butts, but their sergeants swore at them and made them quit. We’d shot a few of them—I heard we killed three and the rest were pretty mad. Five of us had been shot, and two were dead.

  Another lander came down in the cienega, and they loaded us and took off. They didn’t stop at Lukachukai. They flew us straight to Window Rock, where they’d set up a fenced compound with army field shelters, just for guerrillas, and mostly still empty. The other Window Rock internees were kept in the community college and high school auditoriums, and the livestock-judging pavilion.

  The field shelters we were in didn’t have any power cells in the heaters, so they seemed pretty cold, especially for sleeping. Especially when we lay on our cots in summer-weight sleeping bags, shivering and looking out through the transparent roofs, seeing stars through holes in the clouds.

  Actually, most of us didn’t know what it was to sleep cold. Not then.

  The army let us know about our families—Marilyn at the school—but they kept us segregated. We were guerrillas. I never thought of myself that way, but we were. They kept bringing more people to the guerrilla compound, some of them women. This went on for several days. The Navajo Reservation is bigger than some states—about the size of West Virginia—with a thousand canyons, a thousand ridges and mesas, and a lot of its people live out among them on isolated ranches.

  The army didn’t know who or where the guerrillas were. So they waited for attacks, and killed or rounded up the attackers, and checked out little ranches for groups of men with weapons.

  Quite a few White Mountain Apaches had driven up from the Fort Apache Reservation—seventy or eighty at least—and maybe forty or fifty from the San Carlos, connecting up with the Navajos they’d contacted earlier, through the committees. The police and the army didn’t try to keep them from coming. Maybe they wanted them to come and get rounded up; they probably thought that those who came would be the hardcore resistance on the other reservations, and they’d get them now instead of later. There were also twenty or thirty Jicarilla Apache, and nine who came all the way from Mescalero in a van, expecting to get arrested and jailed on the way. There was even a work van load from the tiny Yavapai Reservation, mixed-blood Apaches and Yavapais who
spoke only English.

  Those numbers are not exact. I’ve estimated from hearsay, and from how many ended up in the guerrilla compound. The nine Mescaleros are the only ones whose starting number I learned exactly. Four of the nine were killed or hospitalized, or maybe escaped to hide out somewhere; the other five were interned with us.

  The compound got more and more crowded until, after eight days, more troops arrived. Not the U.S. Army this time, but CoDominium Marines. Russian-speaking. Someone said the army wasn’t happy about having to do that job and that the whole thing had gotten out. Soldiers had told their families on the phone, also the newsfax and television, and the government couldn’t pretend anymore that nothing was going on.

  Then shuttles landed at the Window Rock airfield and they started loading us. I was lucky: I got a seat by one of the windows. After a few minutes we lifted, moving upward and outward till the rim of the Earth curved blue and white against black, and still outward till the curvature was strong. If I’d had a better view, I could have seen the Earth as a great beautiful ball. Finally, out beyond the outer Van Allen Belt, we docked with a converted freighter waiting to take us to Haven. I was feeling pretty bad; I thought I’d never see my wife again. But before they finished shuttling people up, they’d brought all the internees, Marilyn included, and we were together again.

  2074, Luna

  The Alexei Makarov was not a Bureau of Relocation ship. It was a tramp ore carrier on contract to Kennicott. They’d put in temporary facilities in the cargo holds, to take immigrants on the return trip. We slept in stacks of narrow bunks, used long common latrines, and ate standing up.

  At the start there were 2,436 men and boys, and 1,179 women and girls, thirteen years old or older. There had been more than three hundred younger children with the internees, but someone in the government got them taken away before we shuttled up. The woman in charge of taking them said they’d be settled with people on Earth; that conditions on Haven were too extreme for young children. That didn’t help the children born aboard the Makarov. And it wouldn’t help those who would be born after we arrived on Haven. Or their mothers.

  One of the first things Marilyn told me, when we got together, was that she’d started getting morning sickness when she was interned; we were going to be parents. She didn’t know what that meant. I did—I’d read about childbirth on Haven—but I didn’t tell her.

  Meanwhile there were more than 3,600 of the Dinneh living in badly crowded conditions on the Makarov. I got the numbers from George Frank, the Navajo Tribal Chairman, who was the prisoner in charge of prisoners. He was the man responsible to the Marine Commandant for our organization and behavior. Bad colds broke out as soon as the Makarov left orbit. Practically everyone got one, and quite a few went into pneumonia. The Marine medics didn’t have facilities to handle transportees, so only those whose condition was recognized as critical got taken to the clinic. Eleven died. We thought that was pretty bad.

  George organized the Navajos according to clan, and the rest of us by tribe. Although I was only adopted Mescalero, the Mescaleros made me their spokesman because I could speak Navajo pretty well. From the start, most of the Apaches could pretty much carry on a conversation with each other, including the Navajos, each speaking his own dialect. But Mescalero is less like the others, and at first the Mescaleros had trouble understanding and being understood. And no one felt like speaking English; we felt betrayed by the English language government.

  More and more, the Navajos included us in. All of us were Dinneh, George said—we were all “the people.”

  It was the Russian language that complicated things. Like all Americans, we’d taken Russian in school, and the Russian Marines and crew had all taken English, but not many on either side could understand what the other said very well. You had to talk very slowly and keep it simple. Marilyn was an exception. Her MA at the University of New Mexico had been in Native American Languages, but as an undergrad she’d had two years of Russian, on top of the three required years in grade school and a fourth year by choice in high school. So she was our spokesperson with the Russians, who liked her because she used their language so well.

  Most of the Russians were all right. Whatever prejudices they had didn’t include one against American Indians. But there wasn’t anything they could do about too many people in too little space. It was always too hot in the hold. Water was rationed, and there weren’t any showers. We could only wash once a week. After a while the holds smelled pretty bad. The food was poor and monotonous, but it nourished us all right, and on two meals a day, fat people lost weight.

  To help pass the time, we’d sit in groups and tell stories. People would tell the stories of books they read, or movies they’d seen, or places they’d been, or they’d make up stories. At first only a few people would tell stories, but pretty soon more and more told them. Also we slept a lot. George set it up so everyone had a chance to do aerobic exercises once a day, in small groups. Most people did them—it was something to do—and it proved to be a good thing. But it did make it hotter in the holds.

  Marilyn got to know the Marines’ liaison officer, a woman lieutenant named Toloconnicov, who gave her a little book about Haven. It frightened Marilyn to read it. It didn’t sound as bad as the technical articles had, but I didn’t say anything. We’d find out when we got there. It might not be as bad as I expected.

  Something more surprising came from her friendship with Lieutenant Toloconnicov. One day the lieutenant gave Marilyn an envelope and waited while she read what was inside: a formal invitation in English for both of us to have supper with the Marine commander, Major Shcherbatov. Marilyn told the lieutenant that we’d like to go, but we hadn’t had a shower or washed our clothes for nearly five months. The lieutenant wrote us a permission to use showers in the sickbay, and said there’d be clean clothes for us there.

  It felt good to shower and put clean clothes on.

  The major had been stationed in eastern Siberia for a couple of years, and gotten interested in the Chukchi people there. From that he’d gotten interested in American Indians, so he had lots of questions about the Navajo. When he learned that not all of us were Navajo, he had questions about the other Apache tribes, and the Chippewa and the Sioux. We had supper with him twice, and talked for about three hours each time.

  Marilyn asked him questions about Haven, but he claimed he didn’t know much about it. I didn’t believe him. He picked up his wine glass when he said it, which kept him from having to look at her. It didn’t make me feel any better about what we’d find there.

  It took the Makarov more than thirteen months to reach Haven. In that time we received four different series of shots, broad-spectrum vaccines to keep us safe from disease on Haven, as safe as possible. Also, Marilyn gave birth to a boy. We named him Marcel, after my grandfather.

  The week before we entered the Byers System, George said he didn’t feel qualified to be chief on Haven, and proposed Tom Spotted Horse, a retired marine master sergeant in his forties. The council agreed, so Tom was our chief. He organized us into squads, platoons, companies and battalions, and made sure we all knew what we belonged to. We picked our own officers and sergeants. That was tradition, and Tom didn’t know most of the people.

  A few days before we landed, Lieutenant Toloconnicov gave Marilyn a military topographic map of the district where we were supposed to land. Marilyn let me look at it before she took it to Tom. The latitude was subtropical; on a planet known for its cold climate, that was hopeful. The top half of the map showed the south part of a plateau that broke away into badlands. South of the badlands was a basin with the word desert on it. There were no towns or roads, but the plateau had a few thin broken lines with the words livestock driveway, and across it in large letters, the word KAZAKHS. The Kazakhs, I knew, were a people in Asia, and I remembered reading, years before, that a tribe of Kazakh traditionalists, herdsmen, had gotten the Soviet government to sponsor a Kazakh colony on Haven. This must be where it was.r />
  An X had been marked on the plateau with a marker pen. The only reason I could think of for that was, we were supposed to be put down there. I went with Marilyn and told Tom what I’d made of the map; he listened, and then made me his technical aide.

  The next day, forming up to load into the shuttles, most of us were feeling glad to be getting there at last. Even I was. At least I knew what we were in for. Instead of putting us down where the X was, they put us on a mesa isolated from the plateau by broken lands. Lieutenant Toloconnicov said the Major was responsible for that. He believed that if he lauded us at the X, the Kazakhs, who were armed, would attack us and make slaves out of the prisoners they took.

  Then she marked on the map the mesa she thought we were on. I looked around. The ground cover looked a lot like bunch grass, shin high, with bearded purplish seed heads moving in a light breeze. Low shrubs were scattered around, mostly about knee high and stiff looking. It didn’t look too bad.

  We were told to unload some cases from the shuttles. Some were labeled rations, some blankets, and some tents. One small heavy case was unmarked. Lieutenant Toloconnicov said the ship’s captain was going to keep the stuff, and not give it to us, but the Major was in charge of us, and didn’t let him. She told us this was all that the government had sent along for us here. She sounded apologetic when she said it.

  When all the people and cases were on the ground, Toloconnicov gave Marilyn a package. She told her, “This is a personal gift to you and your husband from Major Shcherbatov. It is not to be opened till we have left. I think the lieutenant knew what it was, but we didn’t ask.

  On the ground, Tom assigned some people to start opening the cases and counting what was in them. The rations were Marine field rations in individual packets, one meal per packet. The blankets were military, too. The tents weren’t modern, individual field tents, but old, obsolete heavy squad tents. To carry them, we’d have to cut them up, if we could find anything to cut them with.