Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  Taking a sip, Tom tried not to gag. It was indeed rather foul, though somewhat less terrible than the usual Terra Novan fare. Carlos chuckled. The beautiful-yet-dangerous woman sauntered away, and David was clearly torn by a desire to check out her ample posterior, and the common sense that doing it in front of the “drug lord” was probably an efficient way to commit suicide. Common sense won, Tom noted as he watched his friend’s struggle out of the corner of his eye, but only just.

  “Yes, señor, my opinion of the rum is the same as yours. But now to business.” He puffed on his own cigar lightly and set it down on his ashtray. “You are both IT people, right?”

  David nodded, his attention restored. “Well, we were once. Not like they’re hiring down here though.”

  Stroking his chin, Tom pondered that for a moment. What could he possibly want us to do. Unless . . . It hit him suddenly. He knows we have the computers. Shit, he must want them, he thought anxiously. They had been careful to hide the machines from prying eyes, as they both knew they could be killed for the things. Tablets surely had immense value to the locals and evidently they had not been careful enough in hiding them. Carlos had many eyes in the village. The fear returned. It was the last real link they had to old Earth. The last piece of technology on this twisted Gilligan’s Island in space.

  “Ah! Very good!” Carlos grinned. “You have your own devices, no?”

  David’s grin fell away, coming late to the same realization, and he glanced at Tom warily.

  Cat’s out of the bag, I guess, Tom thought, noting Carlos’s men around the manor, it’s not like I have a choice here. He nodded reluctantly. “Yes, we have them.” Giving them up would be a terrible blow. The music, games, and old movies stored on them were about the only things that kept him sane.

  “Good. I have a better job for you then, a way you can earn much more than the scraps you get for harvesting my crop.” The grin on Carlos’s face fell away, and a predatory expression flashed for a moment.

  “The pitufos. Smurfs in your language. Blue helmets. You worked for them on Earth once, yes?”

  David took that one. “Yeah. Much good it did us. The blue helmets kicked us off Earth. Or at least their Mexican lackeys did.”

  “I have heard your story from the other workers, yes. Good. I need your help with them.” He picked up his cigar and took a long drag, the cloud of smoke obscuring his face for a moment. “The pitufos, they come and take . . . things. My best cigars, of course, but sometimes . . . they take other things. Tell us to do things at gunpoint.” His expression was pained and dangerous, and Tom saw murder in his eyes, mixed with a strange sadness that smoldered through the hazy cigar smoke like the eyes of the Devil himself. Tom almost flinched despite himself. “You know how it is with them.”

  As David fished absently through the fruit left by the woman, Tom’s thoughts sifted through those words. If the rumors in the village were true, he was probably supplying UN smugglers with alien drugs. But that’s not the issue, Tom’s thoughts were confused, why would a drug lord want to kill off his buyers? There was something personal in all this, something very precious that had been taken by the smurfs. Something that transcended profit.

  “I understand.” He really didn’t, but Tom felt there was no other choice but to go along for the moment.

  “Good. Know this.” Carlos downed the remaining rum in his glass in one quick shot. “We are done with the pitufos. Not even here, on this world, will they leave us in peace. We must rid ourselves of them. But they have ships up there,” he pointed casually toward the sky. “They have drones, and radios, and sensors. Many things. And they record everything. This has made it difficult for us.”

  “Do you have radios of your own?” Tom asked cautiously.

  “Si. But they don’t do us much good. They can find us when we use them and send men and aircraft to hunt us. So, we rarely use them. We can trick some of their sensors and drones, but it’s difficult. And we don’t know what their ships can really do. This is why you are here.”

  “What do you want us to do?” David asked, having cleared most of the provided snacks.

  “Disrupt them. Annoy them. Demoralize them. Break their communications. Make them pay less attention to us or think we are somewhere else. Tell us what you can of their capabilities. I don’t know exactly—but whatever you can do. Cause as much trouble for them as you can. We will do the rest.” Rage simmered beneath Carlos’s demeanor. Tom knew he didn’t really have a choice here either, and he sighed. A casual glance confirmed the enforcers were still watching the exchange. There was no way the plantation master was going to let them live with this information if they did not agree to work for him.

  But then, Tom thought wryly, we already work for him. What difference does it make if we pick tobacco or fuck with blue helmets? At least this won’t suck as badly as slaving away in the sun.

  Carlos continued. “If you do this, you will eat and drink well. You will have favor with us, no one in the village will touch you. You may even have these back.” He presented them with their original shoes, priceless treasures despite the extra wear they had clearly suffered. David gasped in shock. Tom merely held Carlos’s gaze and gave a slight nod of appreciation. The blisters on his feet already seemed to feel better just looking at their original shoes. On Terra Nova, these were worth months of food.

  Carlos continued. “And if you wish it, I can have you taken all the way to the gringo sector when your task is done, ‘South Columbia,’ they call it. It is not an easy journey, but I will get you there safely if you want.”

  Tom didn’t want to know what the penalty for saying no would be. Such a death might be quick. But it was an offer he would’ve accepted regardless of the implied threat, and Carlos probably knew that. For his part, David merely nodded enthusiastically. Anything that didn’t involve slow starvation was sure to be popular with David. Juice trickled down his chin, and Tom wondered briefly if he’d fatten up again now that decent food was back on the menu.

  “Yes . . . we will help you.” Tom agreed. Besides, Tom thought, this will be fun. Fuck the smurfs, and the ship they flew us in on.

  Anxiety was still there, but there was a hint of excitement, too. He puffed nervously on the cigar, wondering where all this would lead. The UN might kill them, Carlos might tire of them and have them killed, or things might go relatively well, and they’d be fighting a war against the UN with nothing more than two tablets and a few armed thugs. And he still had no choice in anything, not really.

  At least it was better than stale bread and shitty shoes, though.

  It was one thing to agree to cause trouble for Carlos’s smurfs, it was quite another to actually do it, Tom realized. He worked the laser-projected virtual keyboard that folded out from his tablet. He looked up and motioned for David to come over. “Check this out.”

  Tom pulled up a photoshop of the high admiral being interviewed by an AP journalist, with several loincloth-covered, which is to say bare-breasted, Terra Novan women of various ethnicities behind him, captioned with “of course I support diversity, haven’t you seen my harem?” The view count was through the roof, though most of the occupation force was far too savvy to actually share the meme openly.

  Most of the occupiers were on a much smaller facsimile of the Internet, scaled down, with the comm relays in major bases and orbiting starships serving as backbones. Security was generally quite poor, for the UN hadn’t seen much need for it when most of the devices even capable of accessing the network were in the hands of their people. For weeks, Tom had composed memes and posted long anti-UN screeds under anonymous burner accounts. David had spent his time digging around for deeper levels of access.

  At first Carlos had seemed quite amused with their antics. The major network hub for Cienfuegos was the starship Angela Merkel, in geosynchronous orbit above. Most traffic went through there, and so he had presented Carlos with a meme based on the ship’s insanely hot captain.

  Tom had sketched out “
The Smurfs of Terra Nova” in old pinup style using a picture of Pamela Andego, the captain of the Angela Merkel. He altered her into a smurf with a provocative little bikini and a suggestive smile, her hands on her hips and breasts thrust prominently forward, her bikini barely holding her breasts in. An army of slobbering, hungry smurf soldiers drooled behind her, tongues lolling out. Each featured a blue helmet with “UN” emblazoned on it. That one did merit several shares.

  Carlos’s grin when he saw it was both hateful and amused. Maybe he won’t murder us in our sleep and take back our shoes after all, Tom had thought. Probably not, anyway.

  After a moment, Carlos had decided to explain a little of his hostility. “You know, with enough beer, the sailors sometimes tell our whores that the captain is also a whore. She sold her body to get her command, they say. Perhaps you can use that.”

  After that, a steady stream of memes had resulted, and two weeks had passed with little results other than shitposts. David, naturally, had been the first to notice that the once plentiful food and drink was starting to thin out a little. There were more enforcers hanging around them, too. Carlos isn’t going to wait much longer. We need a big win, and we need it soon, Tom realized.

  Some of the enforcers had even been making bets on how long they would survive. “Meg bait in a week,” Enrique had said. Jose had disagreed. He figured they had a whole two weeks before Carlos tired of them. Everybody else thought both were being extremely optimistic. The key, Tom knew, was the VPN. That was where the juicy information would be.

  Getting on the wireless network and worming their way into the occupation’s social media networks had been an easy enough task for David, who had been a first-rate network engineer back on old Earth. And Tom’s memes were doing something. The overall tone of social media had changed dramatically since the anonymous posts began. Demoralization was definitely happening at some level, he could tell. But the overall effect was difficult to quantify in any real way. It wasn’t enough.

  “We’ve got news, web forums, social media, public chats, hell there’s even an imageboard on here. The whole damned occupation force is on this shit. Even the sailors.” He had explained to Carlos after David cracked the semi-public network.

  Much chaos could be sown on an imageboard, he knew. UN censors had been after the “wretched hives” of cisheteropatriarchal hate speech for decades, but Tom had always been able to find them on the dark web. Terra Novan networks, far away from the professional bureaucrats in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, were far more lax in their censorship campaigns. He’d found the imageboards on the first day.

  And he had. Pointing out the hypocrisy of the occupiers was easy enough. Carlos had even supplied a list of rapes, murders, and all manner of drunken sexual antics and drug crimes committed by the pitufos. It was a very long list. And that had been in Cienfuegos and neighboring areas alone. Some of the soldiers were of a decent sort, but the reality of the occupation was wearing upon them. Others didn’t care and used the locals as playthings and drug suppliers, but that was useful information in itself.

  Still, without access to the secured network, it was hopeless, and Carlos would surely cast them aside sooner or later.

  “I give up, man. I can’t even get in the fucking VPN. I don’t even see the network. I know it’s there, but . . .” Exasperated, Tom turned to David. If there was going to be a network miracle, it would have to come from him.

  “I think I figured it out,” David said optimistically. “I’m pretty sure it’s just using a standard token generator. Real basic shit. But I can’t brute force it. Not with this hardware. I’ve tried, and it just isn’t working.” he gestured to his tablet. “If we got our hands on a physical device, maybe then I could do something . . . but I’ve no idea how the fuck we do that, dude.”

  Social engineering was Tom’s domain. There had to be a way to get his hands on one of the sailor’s devices. After a few hours, the idea came to him. It was simple enough, but if Carlos didn’t like it, they were probably screwed.

  Before he could lose his nerve, he turned to the chief goon, Enrique. “I need to speak to Carlos. I think I have a way to get him what he wants.” The burly guard nodded silently and vanished. His ability to move so quietly despite his muscular bulk was always unnerving to both programmers.

  Carlos entered a few moments later. The friendly expression had worn thin, and Tom could detect impatience in the man’s gaze. Though the drug lord said nothing, he got the message loud and clear: don’t waste any more of my time.

  Tom dived right into it. “Sir, David cracked their local social media network, but there’s nothing big in it. We’ve caused a lot of mischief in there with memes and social media. Some disinformation, demoralization and that kind of shit. But we could do more if we could get deeper access. The other network is protected by two-factor authentication.” He fumbled a moment trying to think of how to explain it.

  David continued for him, catching on to the idea. The two of them had always made a good development team, as they tended to think along similar lines. “Some of their senior officers will probably have an access token which generates rotating random keys, usually on their smartphones.” Tom frowned, they weren’t exactly smartphones, but he supposed the description was close enough to do. “If we got our hands on one, we might gain some access to the Angela Merkel’s network, at least at some basic level, since the local uplink is connected to that vessel. Give me a couple hours with one, and we could probably crack it. But only if they don’t know it’s been taken. If they know it’s lost or stolen, they will cut off the access.”

  Tom nodded his agreement. “We need this if we’re going to take this to the next level, sir.”

  Carlos considered this for a few moments then nodded gravely. “I will see what I can do. But if I do this for you, I expect a return on my investment. Soon.”

  Tom nodded his agreement quickly.

  “Now let me see what I can do.”

  Not just any whore would do for this job.

  Martina Garcia’s hut, however neat it was, stank of sweat and sex, a smell that had overwhelmed even the native odors of Terra Nova. A gold cross dangled from her neck, her only possession of value if one didn’t count her physical attributes. For a woman who had spent most of her youth on Terra Nova, she retained a great deal of beauty. Large, firm breasts topped a tiny, supple waist, in a traditional hourglass shape. These had served her well enough, as had her . . . flexibility with her clients.

  “Martina,” Carlos asked, glancing sideways at the unusually large Christian symbol fastened to one wall of her hut, “do you have among your clientele any of the . . .” Carlos pointed his finger skyward, in misplaced but perfectly understandable paranoia.

  The hooker cast her eyes low. “You know I do, Don Carlos, many of them. A girl’s got to . . . ”

  He made a gentle shushing motion. “No shame, child, no shame. Yes, a girl’s got to eat. But how do you know when to schedule them? How do you know to free up the time?”

  Without a word she reached fingers down in between breasts ample and firm, pulling out a small and thin grayish device, a UN communicator. “They gave me this,” she said, brightly.

  “Child,” said Carlos, “for this be all thy sins forgiven. Now tell me about your . . . mmm . . . your clients.”

  “Well, you know, Don Carlos, men need to talk . . . ”

  There were other pretty girls near the local base that might compete with her more effectively, were it not for her specialty. Even here, far away from Earth, there were those sailors who had peculiar desires. For them was the other, far larger, wooden cross tied up on the other side of her modest hut. This one was constructed in the manner of a Saint Andrews cross, and it was mostly used to service those among the sailors who possessed a sadomasochistic streak.

  Her flogger cracked, and the man tied to her cross moaned, enjoying the pain. She walked around it to face him on the other side of the cross, giving the sailor an enti
cing view of her naked body. His attention was fully upon her, overwhelmed with lust, but to make sure, her fingers traced along his shoulders and his back, where the skin was warmed by the impact of the flogger. He shivered intensely.

  “I have a special treat for you . . .” she said seductively, her hand reaching lower.

  Her eyes flicked only for the briefest of moments as a small child rifled through the man’s pants and escaped with the smartphone. Viva la revolucion! she thought. Viva libertad!

  Thanks to Carlos, David had managed to image the smartphone before the kid ran off to slip it back to wherever he had nabbed it.

  “How did the kid . . .” David began to ask before Carlos shushed him with a very serious, “You don’t really wanna know.”

  No matter; they had a working image of the device running in a virtual machine, and the security token worked as promised. The access hadn’t been cut. That would do well enough.

  This is amazing, Tom thought to himself, parsing through the owner’s files, everything I need is in here. Whoever Samuel Ellis had been, besides an unwilling stooge, he had a decent amount of access to the communications systems, both at the local base and on board the Angela Merkel. Tom recognized a kindred, if somewhat unimaginative, mind in the man’s e-mails and communications. The patsy was some kind of mid-level IT flunky. While Carlos probably would have preferred control over the ship’s weapons or something, a thing that would never have been possible via network control unless the ship builders were utter morons, which they generally weren’t, Tom was still very pleased with this. There was much mischief that could be caused from Samuel’s position.

  Not the least of which was a bit of social engineering.

  Carlos watched them work from behind, and it was quite unnerving for both of them. Hours went by as both developers poured through the VPN and the device image, looking for potential avenues for mischief. Since the patsy had been a network admin, there had to be something . . .