Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

“Well, his career as a major league pitcher is over.” She tied the suture off, cut the excess, and began to neatly dress the wound. “But yeah.”

  Another man had come into the tent while they were talking. His face was a mass of scar tissue. “Doc, I need to do a scan,” the scarred man said. He held up a palm-sized plastic contraption with a digital screen. “The UN sometimes plants nano-trackers in its bullets.”

  “Go to it, Tene,” she said. “I’m about finished up.”

  Tene walked up and waved the scanner over the flechette slivers. It made a soft beep. He frowned, sending the scars on his face into twisting fractals. He looked at Wyatt and pointed the scanner at him. It made a louder beep.

  “Did you get shot?”

  Wyatt didn’t like the way Tene was looking at him. “No. I sure didn’t.” The scarred man stepped closer. BEEP.

  “GEARY!” shouted Tene. “He’s carrying a tracker!”

  Wyatt was surprised at how quickly the doctor could move. One moment she was putting away bandages, the next moment she was pointing a carbine at him. Bing drew a gun, too. Tene just stood there, holding the scanner next to him. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

  The tent flap opened and Geary entered. He looked at the scene and his face contorted into a grimace. He grabbed Wyatt by the shirt. “I trusted you,” Geary spat.

  “I know.” Wyatt held his hands palms out. “Look, I don’t know what’s happening here but I swear to you . . . I’m not some sort of UN spy.”

  The scanner wouldn’t stop beeping. “He’s lying,” Tene said. “This fucker has led them right to us.”

  Wyatt pointed at the pallet. “Remi’s my best mate. You think I arranged for him to get shot?” Remi groaned at the sound of his name. Geary relaxed his hold and stepped back.

  “Okay, so then what happened?”

  Wyatt closed his eyes. His mind raced. Think. Maybe they implanted something on me. On my revolver? In my clothes? Then he knew. He fumbled for his wallet. Produced the business card—Hue’s business card. He held it in front of the scanner. BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BEEP.

  “Motherfuckers,” said Geary. “I watched them give it to you.”

  “So now what?” said Wyatt.

  Bing spoke up. “Standard doctrine will be to follow up with an air assault at nightfall. They’ll come in by chopper looking to take us at a camp or base.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Mister UN. That’s where we are,” said Tene. “Our camp. I say we leave the tracker here and start moving right now.”

  The doctor looked over at Remi. “This guy’s in no shape to move.”

  “Fine. He can stay behind,” said Tene. “So can his friend.”

  “It’s not going to go down like that,” said Geary. “And it’s a stupid idea. If the PKs get to the camp, they’ll just follow our trail. This many horses and men, moving fast? We’ll have a head start but it won’t be enough. They’ve got—”

  “What if the PKs don’t come to the camp?” said Wyatt.

  Tene waved the scanner at him. “You already led them here!”

  “Hear me out. I haven’t been here long. Not long enough to establish this as a camp. I’ll saddle up a fresh mount and ride off right now with the tracker still in my pocket. As far as the PKs know, all I did was stop here and eat a bite. I’ll circle around to the south. By the time they come at me, I’ll be miles away, and they won’t have any idea where our paths diverged.”

  “That could work,” said Tene. “If you don’t mind dying.”

  “It’s not high on my to do list. But you let me worry about that. I just need a fresh horse.” Wyatt scanned the crowd, waiting for someone to challenge him.

  No one did. After a moment, Geary nodded. “Okay then.”

  Bing led him over to a dapple gray gelding. “This is Argus,” he said.

  Wyatt reached out and stroked the horse’s muscled neck. He leaned forward, speaking in low tones, and blew his breath gently into the horse’s nostril. Argus pricked his ears, flared his nostrils, and blew short, rapid breaths. Wyatt recognized it as an equine greeting. This is my breath, this is who I am. It was a brief but intimate exchange that built trust between rider and mount. Wyatt would need that trust for the ride ahead. “Let’s get you saddled up, Argus.”

  He started tacking up his mount. Geary limped over with some saddlebags of water and food. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said. “I’ve avoided UN patrols before.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “Tene’s plan won’t work. And Remi can’t ride. It’d be a death sentence for him.”

  “Let me do it,” said Geary. “It’s me they want.”

  Wyatt paused and pointed to Geary’s wounded thigh. The bandages were stained with blood. “If you keep riding hard on that leg, you’ll be in worse shape than Remi. Look—just see my mate right, eh? Besides, it’s not just you they want anymore.”

  “I will.” There was nothing else to say, so they finished tacking up the horse in silence.

  Wyatt left the camp and rode south. The forest was dense, and the trails twisted through rugged foothills and perilous cliffs. But the sky overhead was a clean azure without clouds, and the westering sun was painting the rocky canyons the hue of amethyst. Argus had a powerful stride and soon the redoubt was miles behind them.

  They kept up a good pace throughout the day. Even with the shade of the trees, it was hot and he and Argus were soaked with sweat. Wyatt wasn’t quite sure which of them smelled more rotten—either way, it was pretty bad. The chafing on his legs from the unfamiliar saddle was worse.

  He stopped to water Argus a few minutes before sundown. That was when he heard the throbbing sound of rotors in the distance. A moment after, he saw it, coming in from the east, a small black speck in the darkening sky.

  Wyatt knew he had the benefit of the tree cover to keep the helicopter from seeing him easily. They’d be relying on electronic navigation—and they didn’t know the land. That would be their mistake. Wyatt left the trail and started heading southwest towards Gorson’s Gorge and the Griffon Peak tunnel.

  After a few minutes, he came to the edge of the tree canopy, near the banks of a stream that cut through the middle of Gorson’s Gorge. The stream was easy to ford here but doing so would expose him to aerial observation. No way around it. Just do it fast. He urged Argus forward. Water splashed up the horse’s legs as they cantered through the ford. He spotted the UN chopper, a bare few hundred yards away, and it spotted him. The chopper shifted its vector and began to get rapidly closer.

  He rode into the canopy cover on the far side of the stream, then veered the horse into a sharp right hand turn so they were cantering along the edge of the bank. Soon they connected with the abandoned road to the tunnel. He was wide out into the open now but Griffon Peak was just ahead. He could see the cutaway of the old tunnel, a black maw opening into the mountain face. It was time to gallop.

  Argus snorted, sweat foaming his neck, his hooves pounding on the old road. The helicopter was only two hundred yards away and closing. There was a rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire. Bullets exploded on the cracked pavement. He knew they needed to weave and dodge to throw off the machine-gunner’s aim but it was hard at full gallop. Run in a straight line and die. Decelerate and die. He decided to die sprinting and kicked Argus on to even faster speed.

  The tunnel was only twenty yards away now. Ten yards. Five yards. The helicopter had maneuvered again and a hail of gunfire was now spraying ahead of him—across the face of the tunnel, cutting him off. There was nothing to do but ride through it and pray.

  His heart raced with his horse. He felt the heat and pressure of bullets whizzing past him at supersonic speeds. Argus stumbled and for a moment Wyatt thought they were going to die at the tunnel entrance. Then they were in!

  Inside, the Griffon Peak tunnel was on the edge of collapse. The shoddy UN-sponsored construction was not aging well. The rock faces of the corridor were badly cracked and already overgrown with sickly gray-green vines. Chunks of the wall and ceiling littered
the floor by the entrance. The helicopter wouldn’t be able to follow, and he imagined the UN troops would be cautious about advancing into a half-collapsed tunnel in the darkness. He was counting on their cowardice.

  Wyatt had only advanced a few yards when Argus lurched again. A moment later the horse fell, and Wyatt fell alongside him. The sheriff rose to a crouch and examined his horse. Blood was gushing from Argus’s flanks. A burst of high-caliber flechette rounds had savaged the horse. The proud gelding had kept on galloping until he had gotten his rider to safety.

  Argus looked up at him with soulful black eyes. The horse was beginning to spasm in agony. Wyatt laid a soothing hand on Argus’s muzzle. With his other hand, he drew his revolver. “Easy, boy. Easy. Rest now.” He pulled the trigger. The sound was loud in the tunnel, loud enough to muffle his choked cry.

  When the horse was still, he stood up and ran into the darkness. As he ran, he flicked on a torch and began casting its pale spotlight onto the floor ahead, searching, searching. Behind him, he could hear the rumbling thunder of the chopper approaching.

  Fifty yards down the tunnel he found what he was looking for. He got to work.

  By the time Wyatt was finished, the rotor blades of the chopper had stopped humming. The sun was behind the mountain, so the chopper crew had brought the vehicle down right next to the entrance, where its spotlights could illuminate the tunnel.

  A voiced called out. “It does not have to end like this, Wyatt.” It was Bogin. “Today’s indiscretion can be . . . overlooked. Just tell us where we can find resistance camp.”

  Wyatt said nothing. He was well back from the entrance, crouched behind an old dump wagon still loaded with debris. He listened, and waited for a familiar voice.

  “If you make us do this the hard way, it will be very unpleasant for you,” Hue called out. “But very pleasant for me.”

  There it was. The sheriff thumbed back the hammer on his revolver and peeked around the edge of the dump wagon. He counted eight black silhouettes against the chopper’s spotlight—six with rifles and two with pistols. They’d reached the body of his horse, just a few yards inside the tunnel mouth. Wyatt watched as one of the figures—Hue, he thought—bent down and picked something up. Wyatt smiled. He’d left the business card on the horse as a going away present.

  He’d left something else there, too. Something abandoned thirty years ago and nowadays very unstable.

  “I told you not to find me,” Wyatt called. Hue looked up just as the sheriff fired. His bullets slammed into the dynamite he’d tucked beneath the horse’s body. There was a crash like thunder—then blackness.

  Wyatt woke to a quiet world. He groaned, and his voice sounded muffled to his ears. A thick patina of dust billowed off his body as he stood up. There was dried blood around his nostrils and ears and his head pounded. This is going to be the mother of all headaches. Even so, he was intact. The dump wagon had sheltered him from the worst of the blast.

  The same couldn’t be said for the PKs. There was nothing left of them at all. The east end of the Griffon Peak tunnel was entirely choked with fallen rock and rubble. The tunnel entrance had become a tomb. Given its proximity, the helicopter outside had probably been wrecked, too. The sheriff surveyed his work with satisfaction. I gave you a good burial, Argus.

  He began to lope slowly towards the western exit. The sun had risen by the time he made it out of the darkness, and he smiled as the light warmed his face.

  INTERLUDE:

  From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation

  Merely overplaying their hand and their power was not the limit of UN personnel foraying into criminality and vice. Indeed, the latter was much more common than the former, even if the former was common enough. Beyond turning ten- and eleven-year-olds of both sexes into prostitutes, smuggling of rare and precious metals, illegal hunting of Noah-preserved flora and fauna, many of them, including many of the very highest rank, involved themselves in drug smuggling.

  In many ways, of course, drugs were ideal. This was especially true of huánuco, a close cognate of cocaine and derived from a plant that was an ancestor of old Earth’s coca plant. While a suitcase full of refined gold might be found out because the of the weight’s tendency to derange calculations for shuttle flight back to the Earth fleet, or from a ship back down to Old Earth, to say nothing of the suspicious way such a satchel had to be carried aboard, a satchel full of the drug in purest form was even more valuable and weighed no more than the clothing it displaced.

  Among Old Earth’s neo-aristocrats, moreover, the drug had a special snob appeal, because only the very connected, indeed, could obtain it.

  11.

  HUÁNUCO

  Lawrence Railey12

  Tijuana, Mexico

  At first, Thomas Romano thought the incessant pounding was the effects of previous night’s tequila throbbing in his skull. Blurry images of that night started replaying in his mind, downing shot after shot with his roommate, dancing with some pretty local girl whose name couldn’t quite penetrate the brain fog, stumbling outside and falling on the cold stone. He couldn’t even quite recall how he’d made it home.

  The knocking became more urgent. “Immigration! Open up!” Someone yelled in accented English.

  “Tom, Tom, wake up! It’s the federales!” his roommate David exclaimed annoyingly. The thought didn’t quite compute in Tom’s liquor-addled mind. What would the federals want with him? People came to Tijuana all the time to drink and act like idiots. Had he done something else last night? He couldn’t remember enough to be sure.

  Tom groaned and tried to get to his feet, stumbling, a cold spike of fear acting to sober him just enough to avoid falling back onto his bed. An empty beer bottle rolled off the bed with him and crashed to the floor.

  The door flew in suddenly, and Tom’s eyes grew wide. David stood frozen somewhere between panic and fear, his arms in the air.

  “Thomas Romano, David Doherty.” The officer spoke in confident, if heavily accented English. It was not a question. Behind him, a trio of well-armed officers stood ready. Tom’s brain was slow to compute this, but realization came eventually. This is fucking serious, if these were locals, they’d wouldn’t know our names, they wouldn’t be speaking English. What the hell did we do?

  “Yes, sir.” Tom managed, his body battling between adrenaline overload and lethargic hangover. “That’s us . . . ”

  David nodded, sweat dripping from his brow, whether from the fear, or from the effects of the recent UN-enforced air-conditioning ban, Tom couldn’t be sure.

  The officer smiled cruelly, and Tom knew that the excrement was about to encounter an air circulation device.

  “You are currently residing in Mexico illegally. Your visas have expired as of last month, July Twelfth.”

  Shit, Tom thought. Their visas had expired. Getting them renewed had been an impossibility. UN flunkies didn’t care much for people movement, unless they were the right people going to the right places. He and Dave didn’t fall into either category. It had just been too expensive to stay in the United States on a developer’s salary. Mexico, at least, had a long tradition of neglectful government. Neither of them had seriously expected the authorities to actually enforce the law, especially with American dollars smoothing the way.

  American dollars, Tom realized, that might smooth his way out of this, too. He gestured to a small stack of crumpled bills on his workstation. “If you’ll just allow us to . . .” he realized he had to be careful. Bribery, or la mordida as it was often called here, was an art in Mexico. “Well, we can pay the fines straight away, sir. And then we’ll go get our papers in order . . . ”

  The officer smirked with wry amusement, his black mustache twitching slightly. Tom felt a fresh surge of anxiety. It isn’t going to work this time.

  “You do not have enough for that, gringo.” He looked at the wad of crumpled up cash and made a quick mental calculation. There were several c-notes in that pile. “But, you may each have a fe
w minutes to get your things. One bag only.”

  Fortunately, Tom thought, everything of value he had probably would fit in his backpack, and it was likewise for David. He nodded, carefully reaching for his bag, the officers tracking his movements. They looked itchy enough, Tom decided, best to be slow and obvious. Getting deported was bad enough. Getting shot by a corrupt cop was much worse.

  His tablet computer was the first to go into his bag. It was the only thing he owned that was really worth anything. It wasn’t the latest model, of course. It was a decade out of date, scratched up rather badly, and had a thin crack splitting the gorilla glass. But technological advancement had slowed to a crawl in recent years. It was still plenty fast and portable enough.

  More importantly, without his rig, he couldn’t earn anything. A pair of headphones, a quick selection of clothes, a solar charger, for Mexican power was never exactly reliable, and a few basic toiletries followed into the bag. The officer looked at him impatiently. The stack of bills that had been on David’s workstation had already disappeared. In some things, even the Mexican authorities were quite efficient.

  An ailing multicolored bus idled outside, coughing with a cloud of noxious diesel smoke. The trio of federales herded them inside. Stifling heat beat down from the late morning sun, and the bus was even worse, smelling of sweat and farts. The officer smiled again, and Tom felt the fear return. He had an inexplicable feeling that the worst was yet to come.

  “Have a nice trip, amigo.” The officer said ominously, remaining behind as the other three boarded the bus, facing the involuntary passengers.

  David looked up and grinned wryly. “We aren’t dead. So, we’ve got that, which is nice.”

  “Do you have a movie quote for everything?” Tom said, rubbing his temples, trying to banish the headache and his anxiety, and failing at both. “No, strike that. I already know the answer.”

  Sweat was soaking his T-shirt within minutes, and the guards offered no water.