Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  Jamal shrugged. “Something like that. Although killing your daughter is not, in truth, the Saudi way . . . ”

  At 8am ship’s time sharp, I presented myself to the shipboard summit. It’s a room full of senior crew and colony council bureaucrats—the bigwigs chosen to rule over us, God forgive us, when we get to the other end. I put forward my view that dad couldn’t stay living with his daughter and we don’t have the brig space to lock him up until we reach Terra Nova.

  We spent hours and hours discussing this. The geopolitical, philosophical and legal ramifications of a baby aboard ship and granddad being out of the picture, blah blah. Almost everyone on this ship, except yours truly, has a Ph.D. in something or other. The medical team report that the baby is developing normally. Eventually housing agrees with me that Besma and her boyfriend need to move to their own large cabin in the European quarter. To make room for the poor sod currently in the cabin, housing will convert a storage container on C Deck.

  In the meantime, dad will sign a contract to keep out the European quarter. Daughter and dad will talk to the ship’s counselor—the ‘go to’ option for every fight aboard ship.

  I let out al Damer. He was as meek as a baby. He went back to his cabin, his daughter moved out, and I started to believe I’d hear no more about it.

  Shows you can never be too cynical as a cop.

  I’d like to say the next thing I did was investigate the suspicious deaths, but the truth is that OpSec doesn’t work that way. As per usual, there were only two of us on duty—myself and Larry, the USA Group Liaison.

  On the way back to OpSec, I was diverted to the botany labs. A Dutch botanist had called to report that the bootleg brewer was up to his old tricks again. The complainant was European and Larry had to hold the fort.

  I spent the next half hour talking to an American botanist who was adamant that, no siree, he was nothing to do with the French bloke I’d nicked (arrested) for brewing booze the previous week, and—yeah—the fermenting potatoes were one hundred percent for research purposes.

  We took him down to OpSec where, because it was busy, Ryan and I (we were on first-name terms by this point) spent an hour talking about American spelling and mutual friends. Turned out that he was Angel’s boyfriend.

  His fingerprints matched up with the ones on the vodka we’d confiscated the previous week. I persuaded him to sign a waiver and left him in the waiting area while Larry got a warrant to search his cabin.

  Later that day, Larry told me there’d been a drunken fight on the American side of A Deck. Two people taken to MedLab with minor cuts and bruises. A third bloke arrested. An hour later Larry found five litres of vodka stashed in the bootlegger’s cabin.

  I’d love to say that we banged him up until we hit Terra Nova, but the captain told Larry that “prohibition didn’t work.” So, later that evening, I let the bootlegger go. He and his mate’ll get to carry on brewing booze, but under close supervision . . . apparently.

  Yes. Babysitting bootleggers. This is why I joined a mission to the stars.

  Death knocks were the worst part of being a copper. You’re telling a loved one that they’re never going to see their mother, wife, husband, son, or daughter ever again. Even when it’s an accidental death, and you weren’t on the scene, it doesn’t make it any easier. That said, I’ve had a few weird ones where I had to call HQ to check that it wasn’t suspicious and the family member had an alibi.

  Al Damer, I expected to be a weird one. We picked him up after Larry got a report from MedLab “Male arguing with staff. Wants to see his daughter.” I was still babysitting the bootlegger, so he woke up Simon Zhang, the Singaporean Asia-Pacific Group liaison.

  By the time I arrived, al Damer was sitting in the MedLab waiting room. He’d been handcuffed and his head was down. I’d be lying if I said I’d expected him to be upset, but his whole body was shaking with grief, poor bloke. Someone, possibly Simon, had made him a cup of tea—although, with the cuffs on, he couldn’t drink it.

  Now, I wasn’t a detective. I’d never wanted to be, and I certainly wasn’t trained in interview techniques like you see on TV. The closest I’d got to criminological profiling was talking a drunk guy down off a roof in Brixton. I had no idea how to interrogate a Saudi chemist who may—or may not—have murdered his kid.

  So I did my usual routine for death knocks. Introducing myself. Expressing sympathies. Looking sympathetic.

  Al Damer looked up at me. He was a well-turned out bloke; neatly-trimmed goatee beard, black-rimmed designer specs, but right then his eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot. Either he was the world’s greatest actor or he was genuinely gutted by the death of his daughter.

  “You know I’ve got to ask you some questions?” I said gently.

  He nodded stiffly.

  “Do you want to speak to anyone? A lawyer, maybe?”

  A slow dark flush spread across his cheeks. “You believe I killed my daughter. But it is you who is responsible . . . ”

  “Okay.” This was news to me.

  “. . . You took her away to be with the German boy.”

  “Okay.”

  “You let her continue drinking . . . whoring . . . when she is just a girl and it is haram.”

  “Okay.”

  “Our people are not like you. We don’t do this. That boy changed her. She was a good girl. Because of this, Besma, the flower of my life, she is dead.”

  I reflected on this for a moment. This was the bloke who’d locked his daughter in his cabin, and then gone crazy, threatening to kill her boyfriend. I gently pointed this out. Then I asked him when he last saw his daughter.

  He shook his head, “I have not seen my daughter. How could I see her? You stopped me. I promised my wife, Allah have mercy, I would keep my children safe.”

  He sounded honest. We hadn’t heard a dicky bird about him. He began to pray, “Allah, have mercy on my daughter. Have mercy on me. Guide me. Guide me.” Looking into his tear-streaked face, I could have been looking at myself, six years ago. Grieving dad. Trying to make sense of a new world.

  “Look, I need your help, Akbar,” I said. “We think your daughter’s death could have been suspicious . . . ”

  “Your colleague says that you have no idea how my daughter died.”

  “Investigations are ongoing,” I said, “. . . But if it is suspicious, I want to catch the bugger who did it. You’re her father. You might know.”

  He thought about this. “Tony,” he said, shaking his head slowly with each syllable, “know that I did not kill my daughter.”

  “You allegedly locked her in your cabin. At least ten people heard you threatening to kill her boyfriend. You can see how that might look?”

  “It was in the heat of anger. There is no reason for me to kill my daughter. She is my blood. We are going to a new world. We have no other family. We are blood. How can you think I would kill my own blood?”

  “She shamed you?”

  “Honor killing is not part of my culture.”

  “Then why lock her up?”

  He met my eyes. “My daughter had gone wild aboard this ship. It is full of temptations . . . I wished to protect her. I have a good friend, a good Muslim. He lost his wife to cancer and, awash of grief, he came on this mission. I wished him to marry my daughter—I thought he would be a calming influence upon her.”

  “And you locked her up?”

  “I needed her to be without child. I knew she would not agree.”

  I was interrupted by a pat on the shoulder. Simon, the Asia-Pacific liaison, said, “Sorry . . . Lizzie wants to talk to you outside.”

  I stepped into the corridor and Lizzie handed me a tablet PC. “The doc’s got a preliminary COD [cause of death].”

  “Which is?”

  “Probably methanol poisoning, poor bairns. He’s trying to firm it up right now.”

  I looked down at the pad. It was all numbers and percentages. “Any idea where the methanol came from?”

  She shook her hea
d.

  I thought about al Damer. “How about the chemistry labs?”

  “Ach, I suppose so.”

  I thanked her and walked back into the waiting room. Al Damer was exactly where I left him.

  “You’re a chemist, aren’t you?” I asked.

  He nodded, warily.

  “How often do you use methanol?”

  He put his head into his handcuffed hands. “That is how she died, isn’t it? This is all your fault—she drank, which is haram, and she died—” I heard him choke up, and then he howled like a wounded animal.

  I left him with his grief. And maybe I took a little of it with me, too.

  Food. It brings people together across cultural barriers—or, at least, that’s what the cultural diversity people at UN Headquarters insisted, during our training. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t object to the idea of cultural awareness. The reality, though, was some of us—Jamal and I included—privately questioned why we were spending so much time on stuff that seemed unnecessary.

  I don’t think we were interested in a sociology professor from Geneva discussing “diversity of cultural expression”—and other jargon—while we watched Japanese puppet theatre. Us security officers fondly imagined our job was stopping a Japanese linguist getting into fisticuffs with his Malaysian counterpart over something that happened in World War II (which only happened sometimes).

  Yet, twenty days in, we still hadn’t covered basic questions like: “Why do cultures differ?” “How does this lead to misunderstandings?” “What tips, tricks or advice are there for social mediation, i.e. helping people from different cultures get along?”

  Maybe even, “How do you deal with a Saudi bloke who may have killed his own daughter?”

  Luckily, like all good coppers, Jamal and I aren’t averse to a great dinner or two. So I met him at the Ban Kai Moon saloon for a freshly-made curry. It wasn’t a good curry, let alone great, made even less tasty by the thin air interfering with the smell, but it was the best you’re likely to get 50AU from Earth.

  I showed him the audio-visual recording of my conversation with al Damer. Jamal used an earpiece to keep anyone else from listening in.

  “You think he did it?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He prodded his curry with a spoon, thinking. “He’s not a psychopath. The pre-mission tests weeded them out. He is correct that honor killing is rare in Saudi Arabia. It’s more common in rural Pakistan.”

  Jamal had family in Saudi Arabia. He loved them. Talked about them all the time. He’d lived in Saudi for twelve years and New York for five. That made him either an unbiased expert or a lying patriot—although, to be honest, it didn’t matter either way.

  “So what does happen if a girl shames her family?”

  “By getting pregnant? She has a secret abortion. If word gets out, she is quickly married off to an older man. If not, Saudi women are smart. My relatives tell me girls use goat’s blood capsules to fake virginity.”

  “What al Damer said, then.”

  “Do you believe him?” asked Jamal.

  “He’s a grief-stricken dad,” I said.

  So, yes, I believed him. I had first-hand experience. Thing is, what I believed was entirely irrelevant to whether he would end up being spaced as a murderer. The way the law works, even in space, is that you can only get convicted of a crime if there’s evidence—beyond reasonable doubt—that you committed the crime.

  And, right then, neither Jamal or I had any evidence.

  We squeezed into al Damer’s cabin on A Deck and found nothing but kids’ clothes and a well-thumbed Koran. I picked it up and looked at it. I knew there was not a word in the book that sanctioned honor killings. Negative evidence counts, too. We took the lift down to B Deck and chatted to the scientists working overnight shifts. They didn’t use methanol and had no reason to suspect al Damer. We rode another floor down to the maintenance area on C Deck where we found a stash of ganja in the head technician’s office. I told him to bag it up and OpSec would give him a ration card.

  Jamal and I went back to the canteen to search the shipboard surveillance systems for footage of al Damer in MedLab or outside his daughter’s cabin. He’d never been in either place.

  At 01:00 ship’s time, I finally made a call to Earth to report the murders. It would be fourteen hours—more than half a day—before I got a reply, even an acknowledgement. With no excuse to hold him, and two drunks asleep in the waiting room, Jamal and I told Dr. al Damer to keep out of trouble and released him to his cabin. By Sod’s law, I shouldn’t have.

  An hour later, I rode the lift back to my cramped cabin.

  I’d only been in bed ten minutes—or that’s how it felt anyway—when OpSec put out a general call for assistance:

  “All officers to attend B Deck, Section 2. Reports of youths fighting in the Middle Eastern quarter. Weapons seen.”

  It was 04:00. My cabin was in the aft of the ship. Section 2 was towards the bow. I couldn’t hear anything. At that stage, I didn’t know how bad things were going to get. I thought it was the usual. Drunks . . . lover’s tiff . . . I didn’t make the connection.

  I started shrugging my uniform back on. I was about to clip on my communicator when I felt the floor shake beneath my feet. Then the lights flickered and went out briefly. I heard the shipboard PA crackle into life: “Warning. Air system failure. Air system failure on B Deck,” and I thought shit, that’s bad.

  For the first time since we’d blasted into space, I felt my life was in danger. It was an odd feeling in a cabin with no sign of a problem, on a space mission that was dangerous by definition.

  I was the frontline of security on the ship. The ship was designed to automatically close off corridors and cabins to maintain oxygen and Co2 levels. I didn’t want to go outside the safety of my cabin, but I sort of had to. I raided my closet for my emergency spacesuit—chunky helmet, thick padded chest plate, protective boots—and opened the door onto the B Deck corridor.

  The first thing I noticed was . . . well, nothing. The corridor’s usually busy 24/7, all the time, with the ship having no true night or day. But it was empty and silent. I guess people were staying in their cabins, for safety.

  My protective boots made a heavy thudding sound, but I soon heard shouts and chants above my footsteps. An insistent amber light popped up on my heads-up display to report that oxygen concentrations were twenty-six percent and rising. I turned a corner and heard Jamal shout “No sparks,” and was in the thick of twenty lads fighting . . . just like a pub fight.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  Our officers, some crew, and a couple of big Turkish colonists, were trying to break them up. In the low light of the ship’s corridor, claret [blood] was splattered across faces. The youths, all mid-teens I’d guess, were coded like a football team, but without the strips—Arab-looking lads on one side, and a smattering of black teenagers and various white Europeans on the other.

  I’ve dealt with a fair few ruckuses as a cop, but my instinct was to stop and gawk . . . We were in a narrow, rotating tunnel with broken ventilation pipes lining the walls and the metal gangway splattered with blood. A few of the Arab lads had makeshift weapons you’d never find in a pub brawl . . . a spacesuit tether line, a zoologist’s tranquilizer gun, and nail scissors.

  I felt my hands sweating in my spacesuit gloves. The total Twilight Zone-ness of the situation was unnerving. The low gravity, half that of Earth, gave the rioters’ movements a clumsy, unworldly grace.

  “Tony,” someone shouted. “Over here.”

  I rushed over to help a group of crew members who were holding two youths apart. They were trying to get them into handcuffs, but the Polish youth was spitting and shouting. “Calm down. You’re under arrest,” I said, and locked handcuffs onto his wrists while he cursed me—for “protecting a murderer.”

  The fight, I realized, was close to Dr. al Damer’s quarters.

  Some of the maintenance crew had arrived from
C Deck. They dragged the shouting youth off towards the brig while I ran back. I had sweat pouring down my back—completely terrified and trying not to show it—and my skin was prickling with fear. The oxygen percentage was up to thirty-one percent, but the teenagers were still in full punch up mode—either too angry or too drunk to care.

  Jamal was grappling with an Arab-looking teenager armed with a short rod with a spike at the end (a soil penetrometer he’d nicked from storage). He was quite tall and lanky, and brandishing it overhead like a short spear. I rammed into him like a rugby prop forward, which sounds brutal, but there’s no good way of subduing a crazy drunk. “Police, police,” I shouted, and the rod went skidding across the deck. The youth swore and yelled, “Get the fuck off me,” and we rolled about on the metal gangway, until Jamal and a guy I didn’t know managed to grab both his arms.

  By the time we got him into handcuffs, the others had got control of the fight and the various combatants were being dragged towards nearby cabins for questioning. I was about to send our youth off with the rest of them when I noticed his narrow face, thick wavy hair and slightly angular eyebrows. They had a family resemblance to the girl on the mortuary slab.

  “Al Damer?” I asked.

  “Fuck you,” he replied, which was all I needed to put two and two together.

  Taking that as a “yes,” we wrestled Besma’s brother, Rashid, into a nearby cabin. Jamal gave him a cup of coffee while the rest of us spent what seemed like days interviewing a motley collection of Arabs and Westerners—many of whom turned out to be Rashid’s ex-drinking buddies. Unsurprisingly, they all blamed each other.

  It was all “Rashid drunk himself stupid.” “Then his Muslim friends attacked us” and “this mob of Westerners set upon us—for no reason. They’re all Islamophobic, man.”

  From what I could tell, Rashid and a bunch of other teenage wasters of various nationalities had taken to hanging around the hydroponics bays on C Deck. Mostly boozing and having sex behind the dwarf wheat—just like every bored yobbo back on Earth, but with a decent excuse for having nothing to do and a better class of parent.