Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  David grinned. “Yes! I’ve got access to their e-mail server! Now . . . what could I do with that . . . ”

  “We could send an order or something.” Tom suggested helpfully. “Normally nobody would ever take orders via an e-mail. At least I’m pretty sure that’s standard military protocol. But look, if some dumb grunt gets an order from the high admiral in an e-mail, is he really going to say no?”

  “Go on,” Carlos said with a hint of interest.

  Tom continued. “This is the kind of trick that might only work once. We spoof the high admiral’s e-mail using his own admin credentials, get Samuel to do something you need that we don’t have direct access to. Since he’s a network admin, he’d have control over the comms. Now, if and when he figures out the order is fake . . . ”

  “. . . then it won’t work again,” Carlos finished, tapping his ashes out on a small ashtray. “They will know better.” Carlos didn’t say, but silently wondered, Unless, of course, the stooge keeps it secret to cover his own ass.

  “Yes, they’ll send some communication reminding people not to do dumb shit like that, and it won’t work again. So, what do you want? What can we give you from the comm system that would help you and your men?”

  Carlos relaxed, putting out his cigar and leaning back in his chair. His expression was relaxed and contemplative. Tom felt an inexplicable wave of relief wash over him.

  “I’m glad you asked, señor. As I said before, they keep tracking our radios—not just mine, but all the fighters on Cienfuegos—and so we have stopped using them. But that makes problems for us because we can’t coordinate well over long distances and communications rely upon runners who are sometimes caught, and . . . ”

  . . . and so, Petty Officer Ellis, I will need you to disable radio monitoring for the frequencies listed in the attached spreadsheet, in the Angela Merkel’s zone of responsibility. Now, the reasons for this are to remain on a strictly need-to-know basis. Do not share this with any other crew aboard the Angela Merkel, and if anyone asks why the monitoring of these frequencies has been disabled, you will explain that the order came directly from me and to contact me directly if verification is required. Do not say anything else, or the communications tests we are conducting will be unduly delayed. You have been chosen out of all others because of your high marks on our aptitude tests and your dedication to duty.

  High Admiral Justin Hortzmann . . .

  David finished reading the high admiral’s e-mail signature and smiled. “Hopefully this works. It’s pretty risky.”

  Tom nodded and took a long pull from the rum bottle as he sent the email. For the first time in a while he felt in control of his situation, if only a little bit. The food and drink had returned since they’d started reading the Angela Merkel’s email. That had won favor with Carlos almost immediately, for the intelligence buried in it had proven helpful in ways Tom really didn’t want to know. He was sure it was going to get some blue helmets killed somewhere, somehow. And this little social engineering trick, if it worked, ought to buy even more favor.

  It feels good, he thought. Terra Nova sucks, but as far as life on this planet goes, this isn’t so bad. Sure, maybe he kills us, maybe he doesn’t, but at least it’s not tobacco farming. He felt a sudden, purely psychosomatic, twinge of the agony-in-the-back that was part and parcel of pulling tobacco from the beds before it was transplanted.

  “Yes, I know it’s risky, but this guy looks to be both arrogant and stupid. He might really believe the high admiral chose him for some hush-hush op because he’s super smart or some shit. Anyway, if it works, the all the fighters in Cienfuegos will be able to use their radios again. They’ll have a whole list of safe frequencies to use. It’ll be a big win.” Tom almost felt bad for the guy, but thought better of it. Samuel Ellis was a tool, another faceless smurf in an army of them, part of the system that had exiled them across the universe. Assuming we’re even in the same universe. And he was an arrogant ass who thought he was some kind of super genius. Every e-mail and social media post oozed with self-importance.

  “What do you think the guerillas will do, if they can use their radios again?” David asked.

  Tom shrugged. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. The less we know about what they do, the less chance of us ending up dead.”

  Behind them, Enrique shuffled his feet, getting their attention. You never knew if he was lurking nearby. “We will use this to kill pitufos, señor. Lots of them. Help us plan attacks. Coordinate.” His English was thickly accented, and the last word was mangled pretty badly. “What more do you need to know? But this is good. We do not have to cut you up and make you into meg bait.” Enrique’s smile looked a little too eager. Carlos waved him away distractedly, but Tom noted that the drug lord didn’t contradict Enrique, either.

  David laughed, thinking it was a joke. Tom wasn’t so sure, yet. At the very least, he had no desire to put the supposed joke to the test. Carlos vanished, off to whatever drug lord business he attended to when he wasn’t monitoring their progress.

  “Fine with me,” David began. “Anyway, that reminds me. They’ll want us dead for this, too.” His smile turned into a smirk, and he pointed to his own machine. “I was pinging all cameras on the ship and seeing which ones I could get access to. Unfortunately, most of the original cameras were heavily secured, and most of the private cameras were . . . well, not very useful to me. However, the captain has one in her quarters. We can tap into it, see what we can see . . . ”

  “A watch party then,” Tom said, motioning toward Carlos’s men. He explained it to them. They would watch for a while, on and off, and see if they could catch anything interesting and useful. They couldn’t save every bit of video from the cameras, they didn’t have the disk space, Tom knew. But they could run a twenty-four hour rolling backup in case they caught anything interesting.

  The captain walked into her quarters a few hours later, and she started stripping down. That got the attention of Carlos’s men.

  “We’ve got bush . . . we’ve got bush . . .” David quoted. Tom knew it had to be from some ancient movie in David’s collection. Everything was movie quotes with him, it was a habit that had long annoyed Tom, but it was part and parcel of having David for a coworker and roommate. Sure enough, the captain was soon naked, and changing into some lingerie outfit that looked vaguely kinky.

  “She is pretty hot . . .” Tom observed. An older man entered her quarters, and began stripping down himself. That drew groans and complaints from the guards.

  “Si. She is sexy. But why is she with that old man?” Enrique wondered aloud. “Is it true that the captain is a whore?”

  Tom watched as the old man produced a flogger from his bag, and began twirling it around in his hand to some kind of cadence. The whole thing appeared to require a great deal of skill. Periodically, it slammed against the captain’s ample—and very red—ass. He turned to face the camera, reaching for another implement.

  Tom pulled a screenshot and enhanced it. “It can’t be. No fucking way . . .” He zoomed in to the face, recognizing it from the memes he’d been posting all over social media.

  David nodded in sudden, excited recognition. “It is. It’s HIM. The high-fucking-admiral. Holy shit. Pull up the social media feeds, this shit is going viral!”

  Normally the view counts on their posts were high, but the shares were few. Nobody wanted to be seen making a career-limiting social media post sharing some shitpost meme. Sure, they’d view it, maybe even tell their buddies about it. But few were willing to share it or post it on their walls.

  The sex tape made the rounds anyway. Shares exploded all over the network. It was too juicy not to share. And once a few did it, the rest figured they had some kind of group immunity.

  After a couple of days, Tom wasn’t sure there was any smurf on Terra Nova who hadn’t seen the video.

  She wasn’t sure which was worse, the embarrassment of having her entire crew see the sex tape in perfect high definition, colo
r-corrected detail, or knowing that the high admiral would soon be calling her, wondering why their tryst was being broadcast to the entire UN presence on and around Terra Nova.

  Either way, the dread in the pit of her stomach was overwhelming. And she couldn’t help wondering if every crew member she interacted with was mentally undressing her. She could think of little else. Whoever had distributed the video had known his business. Even the huánuco was doing nothing to soothe her, now.

  The communicator chimed, and the dread multiplied. She held back the tears and the tremors, but just barely. The face of the high admiral appeared.

  “Captain. You undoubtedly know why I’ve called.” His face was stoic and unreadable. That he had called her by her rank, and not her first name, boded ill.

  But he was the one who wanted me to record everything and send the video to him, she wanted to protest. The high admiral got off on it, she supposed.

  She nodded and tried to keep her voice level. “Yes, sir. I can explain, there’s been a series of strange incidents on social media recently, some kind of anonymous traitor or something who has been demoralizing our forces, and . . . ”

  “Don’t bother, I’m apprised of the situation. We’ve been looking into it too.” He took a deep breath and looked like he was steeling himself for something. “I’m not having you relieved of command, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Being frank, it looks as bad for me as it does for you. We’re going to bury this thing as much as we can. Fortunately, the few on Earth who could make an issue out of this aren’t likely to care, and in any event, I’m blocking the drone-carried return social feeds to Earth for a while. You got rid of the camera, I’m assuming.”

  Pamela nodded and let out a deep sigh of relief. But the dread in her stomach did not subside completely. There would be a price for this consideration, she knew. But she could handle his needs, at least when things calmed down, anyway. “Thank you, sir.” She said simply, blinking quickly to avoid crying.

  The high admiral waved his hand distractedly and continued. “This saboteur needs to be dealt with, Captain. And we now have evidence that he has some kind of access to your ship. First the social media memes, now this. He’s escalating his game.”

  “I don’t think we have a traitor on board, sir. We’ve had monitoring in place on everybody, both in the base down on Cienfuegos and on board the ship. I’ve had people monitoring the people doing the monitoring. There’s nothing, sir! I don’t know who is sending out all this hate speech!”

  Stroking his chin, the High Admiral thought about it for a moment. He gestured downward. “Yes, we’ve considered this. There’s one place you’re not looking.”

  “The colonists, sir?”

  He nodded his agreement. “The colonists. There’s an uplink in Cienfuegos. So, if someone on the surface got access to the uplink somehow, everything that’s happened so far would make sense.”

  “That shouldn’t be possible, sir.” She thought about it for a moment. “They’d need a late-model system, a wideband Wi-Fi transmitter, and a way to power it all. Such equipment is restricted and it’s not like they can just make it here. And they’d need VPN access. That means having a token tied to a user’s device ID. We’ve accounted for all of them, manually! I’ve had eyes on every device.”

  The high admiral frowned, and Pamela felt the dread returning to her stomach. She quickly recovered. “But maybe I should check the recent colonization manifests against the latest drone-datastream from Earth. Just in case anything stands out.”

  “Yes, perhaps you should . . .” The high admiral agreed. His expression changed, and Pamela saw the spark of lust in his eyes. “We’ll keep things quiet for a while, Pam. But when this has blown over, I expect you will make it up to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hortzmann disconnected, and Pamela considered her options. A few mostly gratitude-driven tears welled up and inched down her cheeks. She wiped away her tears and steeled herself before tapping the comm. If it was someone on Cienfuegos, she had some idea of a potential source.

  Cranston’s ugly mug greeted here. “Ma’am?” His voice was vaguely patronizing, and his eyes were roaming where they probably shouldn’t be. He’s seen the tape, she realized suddenly.

  “I need you to start questioning people in Constancia, Lieutenant. I need answers, and I think Carlos might have something to do with what’s been going on.”

  Cranston rubbed his chin, “Why would Carlos do something like that?”

  “Don’t pretend to me, Lieutenant. You know full well. You killed her.”

  Cranston grinned, and Pamela repressed an instinctive shiver. “Oh, well yeah, I suppose he could still be mad about that. What do you want me to do?”

  “Just ask around. Get me some information. If somebody in Carlos’s employ is doing this, I want to know about it. Capiche?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Cranston said, perhaps too eagerly. She cut the comm channel before she succumbed to the temptation to have him taken out behind the base and shot.

  Mirthful laughter echoed in the villa as Carlos nearly spit out his trademark cigar. The high admiral had the captain bent over as he applied a series of spankings to her repeated cries of “yes, daddy!” It had been the third time this week that the video had topped the social media charts. It was both an excellent meme, and basically pornography, which was always popular on any network.

  “Good, good. That will keep them busy for a while. They will be looking for whoever posted this. We can use this time to do more.” Attacks had exploded all over Cienfuegos and the surrounding areas. Carlos was not short on contacts among guerrilla bands, it seemed.

  Tom’s face fell. Shit, I didn’t think about that. Might as well have painted a bullseye on my ass. From the sound of things, Cienfuegos heaved with rebellious activity. Certainly, the local UN base was on lockdown. Knocking shops were nearly empty, and sailors came down in heavily armed groups, now. Only Cranston and his band of smurf thugs were still regular patrons, though they had been making extensive use of them. Whores all throughout the town were up in arms over that. Nobody wanted Cranston or his merry men, as David had termed them, as customers.

  They were going to be looking for the perpetrators, and while it was unlikely their counterparts in orbit would be able to track them, for David had always been a master of his craft, Tom knew, it was still disconcerting. The UN occupiers would surely kill them if they ever found out.

  Still, Carlos remained generous with his food and drink, and the woman from before sauntered in carrying a small box of cigars.

  David’s gaze lingered, looking for a moment into those deep brown eyes, traveling down to the long, dark blond hair that flowed almost to her tiny waist. The combination was highly exotic. At least David had the sense to keep his gaze somewhat discreet.

  Tom detected a certain family resemblance to Carlos and kept his focus on the proffered cigars. David was less careful, as was usually the case with him. He grinned at her, but somehow managed to be almost charming.

  “Gracias,” David said, smiling widely. She smiled sweetly at him in return and opened the cigar box. There was something hard in her eyes, though, and the knife was still there, on her hip. No, she was not one to be messed with at all. David was either unaware, however, or more likely just didn’t care.

  “We celebrate, amigos.” Carlos, seemingly oblivious to the byplay, flicked open his precious lighter as Tom leaned in. “The pitufo whore has been deeply shamed. Perhaps they will even remove her from her ship.”

  David shook his head but lit up his cigar anyway and took a long drag, washing it down with a shot of rum. “No, doesn’t look that way. Comm traffic up there is crazy, but I’ve seen nothing even hinting at a change in command. Only a mass broadcast to find whomever is broadcasting sexist hate speech and slut-shaming the captain for her sexual preferences. The usual UN agitprop, man. Peace, love, diversity, and a lot of weird sex—while on a starship, no less. But we did piss them off. It’s a mes
s up there.”

  And that worries me too, Tom thought, lighting up his own cigar. The person we cribbed the token from might suspect something. Either way, they’re going to have to start looking planetside soon if they aren’t complete idiots.

  Carlos nodded, satisfied. “You have done well for me. I have a new task for you. Do you know how to work on drones?”

  Tom nodded, “I do.”

  “Good, good,” Carlos patted him on the back, nearly dislodging the celebratory cigar from his mouth. The gringo wizards had done so much now that he was totally unsurprised. “This should be fun for you.”

  “You keep using that word,” David quoted. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

  Tom had to resist the urge to facepalm. It was a bad quote, even for David. Enrique, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious, his deep belly laugh filling the room. Who knew that one had to fly all the way to the ass-end of the universe to find someone who hadn’t seen The Princess Bride? But that, he knew, was something he could correct during the next movie night.

  The dining room was luxurious by Terra Novan standards, which were admittedly stuck somewhere in late antiquity. Tom pulled a splinter out of his hand, courtesy of the rough-finished live edge dining table. People on old Earth used to pay extra money for pieces they regarded as more authentic, hand-crafted. Here on Terra Nova, the splinters were free.

  He glanced at his old roommate and tried to figure out how all of this had happened to them, and where he intended to go from here, provided the universe saw fit to supply him with a choice. So far, it had declined to provide him with such opportunities. Or, he thought, maybe I he was just too blind to see them.

  He cut into the chicken on his plate and speared a piece on his stolen UN fork. Carlos had seen fit to supply them with some trappings of civilization, at least.