Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  To be fair, so far they’ve been playing it straight up, them against us, trying to make us sick of it. We can keep that up for a good long while without getting fancy.

  About the other problems there he only wrote the colony name, BALBOA and the words, THINK OVER CAREFULLY.

  On the other hand, there’s no reason not to interdict the flow of arms into the colony, is there? A small team introduced into southern Columbia, too, to seek out and destroy undesirable elements there?

  He’d read the next set of reports before, but had never been able to make up his mind about what to do in Cochin Colony. Give him his due; the frog is making progress there. And he’s only a liability where the press is concerned. Since I will be allowed to control the press, most of it, there should be no problem. I think . . . yes, Cochin goes on least priority; let Arcand have his head.

  Reading on, Ford came to a short paragraph in the report from Cochin concerning discipline, morale and . . . Leave it to the Frogs, field brothels. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be having nearly the problem with desertion one would expect.

  There had been a lot of desertion from among the national forces seconded to the UN and sent to Terra Nova. It was bad enough that they’d typically walked off with their arms and equipment, as well as whatever ammunition they could scrounge up. Worse were the ones who took radios, night vision equipment, or the rare crew served weapon. But the very worst . . .

  FIND THAT HELICOPTER. AND COURT-MARTIAL AND THREATEN TO SHOOT THAT WOMAN’S FORMER CO-PILOT. THAT SHOULD BRING HER AND THE CHOPPER BACK. HMMM . . . THE HELICOPTER? WELL, PROBABLY NOT, NOT IN THAT CLIMATE. BUT IF IT DID STILL WORK, GETTING HER TO SURRENDER WOULD BE ENOUGH. THE GUERILLAS ARE NOT TOO BLOODY LIKELY TO HAVE A SPARE PILOT ON HAND.

  Though normally a humorless sort—Ford never had quite gotten the joke, “and Australia, as everyone knows, is inhabited entirely by criminals”—he couldn’t keep the smile off his face over the pirated porn films from the Angela Merkel.

  SOMEONE ELSE WITH A DESPERATE NEED TO BE RELIEVED AND SENT HOME IN DISGRACE, THE CURRENT HIGH ADMIRAL. OR SHOULD I JUST SHOOT HIM OR HAVE HIM THROWN OFF A CLIFF. WEIGH CAREFULLY.

  Wellington shouldn’t be too hard. It’s an island; we can interdict arms from space easily enough. And it’s not so big that we can’t totally saturate it if I put the whole corps into it at once. We can stage out of Atlantis Island; it’s halfway there anyway . . .

  PRIORITY ONE: TURN ATLANTIS INTO A REAL BASE. PRIORITY TWO: CRUSH THE REBELS IN WELLINGTON.

  One report he found particularly troubling. It concerned a bombing that matched very closely the modus operandi of a group on old Earth, half political terrorist and half criminal. Or maybe a little more than half criminal. We’d wondered why they’d toned down operations on Earth. Maybe now I know; they just moved. They’re going to be tough to deal with, as tough as they were back home. They’re smart, skilled, dedicated, ruthless . . . and why is our intel so goddamned poor here? I shouldn’t have to be figuring this out on my own fifty million miles from the new world.

  INTEL. INTEL. INTEL. WHATEVER IT TAKES. ANY MEANS NECESSARY. I MUST HAVE BETTER INTEL.

  Hmmm . . . intel . . . and rapes . . . and field brothels; the rabble the worst armies of the Third World, back home, give to the UN have done our cause more harm than . . . well, it’s not clear to me they’ve done any good. But maybe, just maybe, I can set up a system of mobile field brothels to keep the troops happy, stop some, at least, of the rapes, and maybe gather some intel, too. Got to be careful about that, though; the girls—well, boys, too, I suppose, for some tastes—are going to be an intelligence sieve for us, as well.

  MOBILE FIELD BROTHELS; THINK OVER CAREFULLY. TIGHT CONTROL OF THE INFORMATION FLOW.

  Ford sighed, then leaned back in his leather chair. While fixed to the carpeted deck beneath him, it was of an altogether superior construction to any on the ship, barring only Captain Mzilikazi’s, reclining nicely.

  We need a base, Ford thought, interlocking his fingers behind his head. We need an unassailable base, someplace we can defend with only the lightest force—maybe even automated, in whole or in part. We need a place the locals can’t bribe our people to loot for them. We’ve plainly been feeding this insurgency . . . these insurgencies, from the beginning. Those arms coming out of the Americans’ colonies were not made there. Erased markings or not, they’re our designs, muzzles to butts.

  I also need a place to rest the troops where they’re not going to need to watch out for a grenade rolled under their tables while they chat up a joy girl.

  Atlantis Island

  Instructions from the ship moved considerably faster than the ship itself, in system. Those instructions, from Ford to his new command, had come in daily bursts, without a great deal of give and take on the other end. The first of these had been:

  “High Admiral Hortzmann is hereby relieved of duty and placed under arrest. Vice Admiral Qin is likewise. Vice Admiral Beattie will assume Qin’s position, pro tem, as Deputy Commander for the fleet. His first priority is to see to Hortzmann’s and Qin’s incarceration, incommunicado. His second is to prepare to build, and then build, a base on Atlantis Island sufficient to billet, rest, train, familiarize, and support a full corps of infantry together with their supporting arms. Further details will follow, especially as regards the intelligence collection and interrogation center. If Beattie does not wish to join Qin and Hortzmann . . . ”

  None of this, of course, is really an IG’s job. But then I’m not really an IG, either.

  Damn, but it’s good to be off that miserable ship.

  “Do a spin around the island,” Ford told the pilot of his shuttle from the Vespucci. “Take your time; I want to see what Beattie’s accomplished.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, there are troops standing by for your arrival parade.”

  Ford scowled. “They won’t break or wilt for waiting in ranks an extra hour. Moreover, I don’t need your advice on ceremonies; do as you’re told.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ford pulled up a map on his tablet, matching what we could see to what he had demanded. From half a mile up, it looked fairly good. There was a large area between two peaks for an artillery impact area, with what appeared to be a series of ranges along two sides of that. He saw a mix of tent cities and more solid barracks to greet the troops as they were thawed and debarked. A ring road around the island wasn’t complete yet, but Beattie had explained that well enough to satisfy the IG. Though the shuttles weren’t nearly complete with bringing down the makings of the two disassembled airships he’d brought from Earth, the massive sheds in which they would be put back together were going up.

  On the whole . . . “Well . . . I suppose the weasel can keep his job for now. Take us to the landing zone by headquarters.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The shuttle didn’t need much of a landing strip, though some fuel and wear and tear could be saved if there was one.

  “I don’t care about that,” Ford explained to the pilot. “Just take me down to the area by the port.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Sir, but what about . . .” The shuttle banked, accelerated, then pulled up, nose first, and began a gentle descent. From the pilot’s compartment Ford could see what were at least hundreds, maybe thousands, of laborers, probably barely clad and working under the hot sun. He was too far away to see that they were under the lash, as well, but he knew that Beattie had put the prisoners of war to use.

  “The troops? The band, sir? They’re . . . ”

  “Give a call down below and have them dismissed. I’m not in the mood for a parade or a speech, anyway.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the pilot, while thinking, Asshole.

  As the shuttle descended, more of the work became visible and in detail. This included the—Might as well be honest and call them what they are—slave laborers.

  “I wonder,” Ford mused aloud, “what the interrogation procedures are for captives?”

  “Talk to me about in
tel, Beattie,” Ford commanded, in the air-conditioned comfort of the first building finished on the island, the Headquarters. Next to it, naturally, was the not quite finished officers’ club. The admiral looked soft and fat compared to Ford’s lean frame.

  “I can get the intel . . .” Beattie stammered.

  “I didn’t ask for the intel officer, dummie; I told you to tell me about it.”

  Oh, dear, thought the vice-admiral. “This is not really my . . . ”

  “Talk, Beattie, now, or go join Hortzmann in the stockade and then the prisoners on construction detail.” Ford gave Beattie a grin replete with menace.

  Beattie’s face paled. He gulped with dread. Being a senior UN officer, set among the prisoners, amounted to a death sentence. And a very bad death at that, he thought, near enough to panic. He forced himself to remain calm. This one is not known for excessive sympathy but, on the other hand, even less for understanding when you try to pull the wool over his eyes. Honesty? In United Nations service? Well, it will at least have the virtue of novelty.

  “We know hardly anything about them, sir!” Beattie blurted out. “They hardly use any radio, so our signals intel is nonexistent. We have informers among them but our consensus is that most of the informers are informing on us. Patrols bring back nothing useful; we either own the areas we patrol in or the enemy does. The end result is exactly the same, nothing.

  “For long range communication they use what the locals call ‘trixies,’ archaeopteryxes, and alleged to be very bright birds, carrying written messages. Those, and human messengers. And we’re not allowed to engage the trixies because the UN Commission on Preserving Indigenous Fauna got them declared endangered.”

  Quite despite the air conditioning, Beattie felt sweat drip down his back as he continued, “General . . . sir, you cannot tell the difference between a perfectly secure area to us and a perfectly secure area for the enemy, because in neither case are there any indicators to judge from.

  “We’re blind as bats, flailing about without point of aim.”

  Ford sat silently, for a long moment, letting the vice-admiral sweat. Finally, when he judged Beattie to be done almost to a turn, he asked, “What about the prisoners?”

  “They just spit at us.”

  “Do they, indeed?” Ford smiled, still more grimly. “Now you can go get me the chief of intelligence. I have a little book for him to read.”

  “A book, sir?”

  “Yes, a book. I brought it from Earth. Some hack science fiction author—of all unlikely things—penned it, oh, it must have been over a hundred years ago, I think. It tells you how to get information from a rock, provided you have at least two rocks with the same information. We’re starting to use the techniques on Earth to deal with some of the more . . . mmmm . . . troublesome . . . citizens.”

  The UN didn’t have much on the prisoners, but at least it could identify where they’d been captured, and why. Since Ford had picked Wellington for his first pacification effort, the forty-nine prisoners taken there were his first targets.

  Listening to a young woman screaming and begging was harder than I expected, Ford thought, said screams echoing from the concrete and coral walls of the new interrogation building. One might be forgiven for believing this one was innocent. But she was caught, red-handed, with explosive residue on her hands and clothes, She’s not innocent at all.

  Besides, the two others being put to the question were caught with the exact same residue on their hands and clothing, and fingered her out of a pictorial lineup, separately. She’s guilty as sin.

  Though Ford forced himself not to think about it, the Maori girl was also tough as nails. She’d withstood the electricity, the driving of long pins under her nails, the brutal removal of a couple of those, and a good deal of time in Skevington’s Daughter, a sort of compressed racklike device, giving up nothing in the process but screams, not even conversation. Now they had both her feet in wooden contraptions—“boots,” they were called—being slowly crushed.

  “I wonder,” he asked himself, “what’s worse for her, the pain or the knowledge that, in the future, she’ll be a permanent cripple if she doesn’t cooperate?”

  The screams suddenly stopped, replaced by mere racking sobs, then what sounded like broken sentences, framed by weeping. The interrogator came out, a few minutes later, looking grim. “She’ll talk now. She’s already corroborated one piece of intel from the other two Wellingtonians. I think she’ll spill her guts pretty easily from now on.”

  “And if not?” Ford asked.

  “The dentist is standing by,” the interrogator replied.

  “Funny,” said the interrogator, “the Pravda was always that you can’t trust torture because people will say anything to stop the pain. What they missed was that anything includes the truth and if that is the only way to stop the pain, once they become convinced that that is the only way . . . ”

  “Then they sing like birds,” Ford finished.

  Little by little, an intelligence estimate built up on the island of Wellington, out in the Mar Furioso. A lot of the intelligence was too dated to be useful, but there were gems within it, lasting, durable gems, nonetheless. Terrain, for example, did not change, and corroborated eyewitness reports of the terrain of a place gave strong indicators of where the limited numbers of guerillas might be hiding. There were places no food could be grown or gathered, or where just about everything was poisonous. Unless those spots were close to farms or towns of fishing villages, there would be no guerillas there because they simply couldn’t survive there.

  Moreover, though seven of the Wellingtonians, unfortunate wretches, had died under torture, several dozen safe houses had been identified from the remainder. Ford and his chief of intelligence also thought they knew where the enemy’s explosives were coming from, and those three locales were very high on the list for eradication.

  “We even have the rudimentary sketches of the enemy chain of command there,” Ford said, patting his intel chief on the shoulder in appreciation. “Well, such as it is.”

  If it wasn’t a stormy night, it was at least a dark one, with none of Terra Nova’s three moons in position to shine a light on Wellington. And as for the storm? That impended from the roughly thirty-six hundred paras from Ford’s Parachute Brigade, standing by, indeed, some of them standing up, rigged for a drop onto the western island of the Wellington Archipelago. On a lower deck, heavy equipment was rigged for a drop, resting on wheeled conveyors and awaiting the push.

  The pathfinders had come in earlier, aboard normal UN resupply missions.

  While it some sense this was to be a mass drop, the largest unit dropped on any place would, in fact, be a company or a battery, and the company, actually, to secure the Drop Zone for the battery. For the most part, the troops would be going down as squads or platoons, to stake out ambush positions to bring a complete halt to all movement on the island. The pathfinders’ job had actually for the most part been to set up radio beacons for the benefit of the airships. Only the three drop zones for the batteries had been actually staked and secured.

  Up on the bridge, still wearing his usual wicked grin, Ford mused, Anybody trying to escape our sweep over the next couple of days is going to find himself, or herself, waltzing into one kill zone after another, subject to observation at all times, and hence to artillery.

  Not that it will be over all that quickly; I’m giving it five terrestrial months to completely break the resistance here. But this will give us the upper hand right away. The enemy below is going to be thinking survival and little but. As we take more prisoners . . . well . . . we get more intel, especially since I’ve now got a thoroughly practiced group of interrogators.

  “Captain?” Ford asked the skipper of the airship he rode.

  “Sir?”

  “Their motto down there is kia mate toa, I understand. It means something like ‘fight to the death.’ Do you think they will?”

  The airship captain just answered with his own wicke
d smile, a silent echo of Ford’s. Then his finger reached out to push the button that would turn red blinking lights to solid green, launching the first of the paras out into the moonless sky.

  “Everyone but the rump of my headquarters is on the ground, sir,” announced the parachute brigade commander, Colonel Langlais, skinny, square-jawed, and exuding an air of utter ferocity. “I’ll join them below now, with your permission.”

  “Do it, and good hunting, Langlais. I’ll be back in six days with two brigades of regular infantry to begin the sweep. I am confident you can hang on until then.”

  “We may die of boredom,” the colonel answered, before sketching out an informal salute and turning on his heels.

  Nine days later, New Wairakei, Wellington

  After a bit over five dozen ambushes disastrous to the resistance, word began to spread rather quickly: Do not leave wherever you happen to be. In the nature of things, that meant there were resistance members, leaders especially, in one place who had come from someplace completely different.

  “And that’s how we catch them,” murmured Ford, watching the entire population of a village marched through a DNA testing station under the guns of one of his four Military Police battalions. “Well, some of them, anyway, enough to be worth the effort.”

  The interrogation tent, like the other fourteen tents set up nearby, had MPs at both the front and rear entrances. It was a smallish tent, maybe a dozen feet across, with a field desk and a chair set up. Another chair sat on the ground next to the field desk.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Singh?” asked the interrogator, a plain-faced woman with a stocky build.