Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  “And afterwards, if we cooperate?” she asked.

  “You, what’s left of you, will join the others.”

  “None of this makes sense,” Jane insisted. “Why, why, do you do these things?”

  “That’s very easy,” Titus Ford answered. “And your knowing it won’t harm me or my cause any, either, not where you’re going.

  “Soldiers, and the more senior, the more this is true, are covetous of power, privileges, perks, and prestige. If I can show good progress in suppressing the rebels here, the Secretary General has promised me that I shall be viceroy for this planet. Think of it; for the first time in history a soldier shall rule an entire planet . . . and that soldier shall be me.

  “And I shall be remembered forever for my part in civilizing this place for mankind. What more can a soldier ask than that?”

  POSTSCRIPT:

  From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation

  With the final subjugation of Wellington, the pattern was set. For the next seven years, the state of the resistance on Terra Nova went from bad to worse. One movement after another was crushed. First went the island colonies of Cienfuegos and Asturias. After those, Secordia felt the hard hand of Titus Ford’s pacification. Then came the turn of Northern Castille, then Southern Castille. Of course, some elements of the resistance went deep underground, hoping to emerge and resume the fight later. But for all practical purposes, once Ford and the much-improved UN Marines settled on pacifying a colony, and then did so, few were bold and brave enough to raise their heads again once they moved on. And the informers and collaborators left behind when Ford moved on were many.

  On the whole, things looked bleak for our ancestors in those years.

  Ford, however, for all his capabilities, made several key mistakes. He forgot, as many generals are wont to do, that, in war, nothing fails like success, that, rather than following normal linear logic, war was the environment where nonlinear logic held sway, where victory contained the seeds of and led to defeat, where success led to failure.

  In other words, with the example of Wellington, Asturias, and Castille in hand, the resistance learned to simply let him occupy their area and wait him out. He, after all, had an entire planet to pacify on a presumptively noninfinite allocation of time. We had only our own little colonies, and all the time in the universe.

  Secondly, he forgot that enemies in war tend to come to resemble each other, often quite closely. If he could massacre a village where a bomb destroyed one of his platoons, so could—and did—we learn to exact frightful reprisals on cities, towns, villages, families, and individuals who collaborated with our occupiers. Did the UN torture for intelligence? God pity the man or woman from their forces who fell into our hands except as a reliable deserter to us.

  Then, too, the more he used modern weapons, inevitably the more modern weapons fell into our hands. We had a claim on the produce of the armories of all of Old Earth, and that claim grew with time.

  Thirdly, Ford presented our scattered resistance movements with what amounted to a global war. This, too, drove us to greater cooperation between movements for so long as the UN occupation lasted. It was not so very long before Sachsen guerillas were to be found fighting in Gaul, Tuscan in Illyria, Dacia, and Attica. We never did achieve a global command structure, of course, barring only the parties assembled for negotiating the final peace treaty, but the UN threat directly drove us into regional and continental cooperation and coordination.

  Fourthly, he forgot that his people had someplace to go home to, Old Earth. We were stuck here, with no place else to go, and the choice of continuing resistance or accepting our status as slaves. Too many, of course, embraced that status. Most, ultimately, would not.

  Finally, Ford’s biggest miscalculation was to forget that he was, longevity treatments notwithstanding, only mortal.

  But that is a tale for the second volume of our history.

  AFTERWORD:

  I joke rather frequently that the reason I wrote three books in John Ringo’s Posleen universe is that I don’t play well with others. It’s sort of true, too. You see, originally, I was supposed to do a new series with John, one to be called The Drift Road Wars and for which he’d written up an extensive outline. As it turned out, I couldn’t, just couldn’t. In a year of trying I’d written maybe fourteen thousand words, each one of which I hated separately but equally. Note, too, I’ve written more than a million words, some years; a mere fourteen thousand represents a psychic shutdown of no mean order.

  Yes, if you’re curious, I was pretty damned difficult in the Army, too.

  So why this? There were a number of reasons.

  The big one was that I wanted to read some stories in my own universe that I didn’t write. Why? Because I tend to write in a spiral—in one case I took particular note of I went through that spiral twenty-seven different times. Yes, that’s right; I rewrote the SOB twenty-seven times. When you do that, you know what? You would rather be duct-taped to a chair, face down, in a prison, than read your own work again.

  Get someone else to write the stories and you don’t have this problem. Clever, no?

  Then, too, while various states show up, more or less incidentally, in the Carreraverse, there are a whole bunch more that there was never room or time to explore. So why not get someone else to do the explorations? Fresh point of view? New personal writing style? If there’s a downside here, I am not seeing it.

  And then there were the writers. Go on, go look at their qualifications. Try not to be envious; if I could do it, you can. We got Academy grads, SEALs, Nuclear Brain Scientists (sorry, Rob, I just couldn’t resist), Harvard Law, Oxford grads, and I don’t mean Oxford, Mississippi . . . smart fuckers all around. Some are newer to writing and some are old hands. All of them have talent.

  I told Libertycon, assembled, a few years back that I’d, myself, assembled an elite team for this and, by God, I did.

  There were a few who dropped out due to work commitments just overtaking them. I understand and, though I replaced them, it was without rancor. They’re welcome back to continue the story of the Wars of Liberation if they can fence the time. So are the ones I recruited to replace them.

  No, I’m probably not going to have an open call for stories. I’ve seen how those tend to work out and it isn’t pretty from anyone’s perspective.

  So what’s next for the Carreraverse and me? Besides death, eventually? Well, sales depending, probably two more of these. As of this writing I am about half done with the final part of Patricio Carrera’s war against the Tauran Union, Ming Zhong Guo, and the United Earth Peace Fleet. I’ll finish that and then put the reconquest of Earth on hold for a couple or three years. It’s its own story, and deserves a somewhat fresh start. After that who knows, but I am inclining toward about six alternate histories, none of them serialized.

  We’ll see.

  FOOTNOTES:

  1 Vivienne Raper is a freelance science writer whose Ph.D. is in satellite engineering but somehow ended up writing about biomedical science for a living. Her major fiction project is trying to finish A Murder at Perihelion, an epic SF crime-thriller combining her interests in space travel, synthetic biology and Sicilian organised crime. She lives in a crumbling Victorian house in London with her medium-sized husband, huge poodle, and small son. Her hobbies include trying to repair the house, reading Warhammer 40K tie-in novels, and collecting over 300 board games (which she occasionally finds time to play in between writing sessions). Her nonfiction work has been published in the Wall Street Journal’s European edition, Spiked, How It Works magazine, and numerous other venues. (PS: Vee’s too shy to mention this, but I’m not. She’s Oxford, and I don’t mean Oxford, Mississippi, too. —Tom)

  2 Officer! My daughter has been kidnapped! I demand you break in there and arrest the kidnapper!

  3 Mike Massa has lived an adventurous life, including stints as Navy SEAL officer, an investment banker and a technologist. He lived outside the U.S. for several ye
ars, plus the usual deployments. Newly published in several Baen S/F anthologies, Mike is collaborating with NYT best-seller John Ringo on two Black Tide Rising novels. Mike is married with three sons, who check daily to see if today is the day they can pull down the old lion. Not yet . . .

  4 Peter Grant was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. Between military service, the IT industry and humanitarian involvement, he traveled throughout sub-Saharan Africa before being ordained as a pastor. He later immigrated to the USA, where he worked as a pastor and prison chaplain until an injury forced his retirement. He is now a full-time writer, and married to a pilot from Alaska. They currently live in Texas. See all of Peter’s books at his Amazon.com author page, or visit him at his blog, Bayou Renaissance Man.

  5 Christopher Nuttall was born in Edinburgh and spent most of his life reading science-fiction and fantasy novels. It was perhaps inevitable that he would eventually try to become a writer himself, crafting the best-selling The Empire’s Corps, Ark Royal and Schooled in Magic series. Chris lives in the UK with his wife Aisha and his two sons, Eric and John.

  6 Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D., turns Science Fiction into Science in his day job, and puts the Science into Science Fiction in his spare time. He has consulted for more than a dozen SF writers, assisting in the (fictional) creation of future medicine, brain computer interfaces, unusual diseases, alien intelligence, novel brain diseases (and the medical nanites to cure them), exotic toxins, and brain effects of a zombie virus. His science and SF writing (as both Robert E. Hampson and under the pseudonym, Tedd Roberts) ranges from the mysteries of the brain to surviving the Apocalypse, from prosthetics to TV & movie diseases, and from fictional depiction of real science to living in space.

  Dr. Hampson is a Professor of Physiology / Pharmacology and Neurology with over 35 years’ experience in animal neuroscience and human neurology. His professional work includes more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles ranging from the pharmacology of memory to the effects of radiation on the brain—and most recently, the first report of a “neural prosthetic” to restore human memory using the brain’s own neural codes.

  7 Monalisa Foster won life’s lottery when she escaped communism and became an unhyphenated American citizen. Her works tend to explore themes of freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility. Despite her degree in physics, she’s worked in several fields including engineering and medicine, but she enjoys being a trophy wife and kept woman the most. She and her husband (who is a writer-once-removed via their marriage) are living their happily ever after in Texas, along with their children, both human and canine. Her publications can be found at www.monalisafoster.com/works.

  8 Justin Watson grew up an Army brat, living in Germany, Alabama, Texas, Korea, Colorado and Alaska, and fed on a steady diet of X-Men, Star Trek, Robert Heinlein, DragonLance, and Babylon 5. While attending West Point, he met his future wife, Michele, on an airplane, and soon began writing in earnest with her encouragement. In 2005 he graduated from West Point and served as a field artillery officer, completing combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and earning the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and the Combat Action Badge.

  Medically retired from the Army in 2015, Justin settled in Houston with Michele, their four children and an excessively friendly Old English Sheepdog.

  9 Kacey Ezell is an active duty USAF instructor pilot with 2500+ hours in the UH-1N Huey and Mi-171 helicopters. When not teaching young pilots to beat the air into submission, she writes sci-fi/fantasy/horror/noir/alternate history fiction. Her first novel, Minds of Men, was a Dragon Award Finalist for Best Alternate History. She’s contributed to multiple Baen anthologies and has twice been selected for inclusion in the Year’s Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction compilation. In 2018, her story “Family Over Blood” won the Year’s Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction Readers’ Choice Award. In addition to writing for Baen, she has published several novels and short stories with independent publisher Chris Kennedy Publishing. She is married with two daughters. You can find out more and join her mailing list at www.kaceyezell.net

  10 A native Texan by birth (if not geography), Chris Smith moved “home” as soon as he could.

  While there, he also met a wonderful lady who somehow found him to be funny, charming, and worth marrying. (She has since changed her mind on the funny and charming, but figures he’s still a keeper.)

  Chris began writing fiction in 2012. His short stories can be found in the following anthologies: “Bad Blood and Old Silver,” (Luna’s Children:Stranger Worlds, Dark Oak Press), “Isaac Crane and the Ancient Hunger” (Dark Corners Anthology, Fantom Enterprises); “200 miles to Huntsville” (Black Tide Rising, Baen); “What Manner of Fool” (Sha’Daa: Inked, Copper Dog Publishing); “Case Hardened” (Forged in Blood, Baen); and “Velut Luna” (The Good, The Bad, and The Merc, Seventh Seal Press)

  He has co-written two novels, Kraken Mare (Severed Press) with Jason Cordova, and Gunpowder and Embers—Last Judgement’s Fire Book 1 (Baen, Forthcoming) with John Ringo and Kacey Ezell. A solo urban fantasy novel is currently under construction.

  His cats allow his family and three dogs to reside with them outside of San Antonio.

  11 Alexander Macris is an entrepreneur, executive, lawyer, and game designer. He currently serves as studio head of Autarch LLC, a tabletop game company, which publishes his best-selling Adventurer Conqueror King System.

  12 Lawrence Railey is a software engineer, musician, amateur historian, and part-time pundit. His attentions are split between writing software, producing various forms of electronic music, and writing speculative commentaries on Late Antiquity, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Byzantine period that followed. His musings on the decline of the modern West can be found at thedeclination.com.

  13 Tom Kratman is a defector from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, having enlisted into the Army in 1974, aged seventeen. He served tours as an enlisted grunt with both the 101st Airborne and the 193rd Infantry Brigade, in Panama. At that point the Army gave Kratman a scholarship and sent him off to Boston College to finish his degree and obtain a commission. Commissioned, he served again in Panama, then with the 24th Infantry Division, and with Recruiting Command.

  Saddam Hussein (UHBP) rescued Tom from the last by invading Kuwait.

  Tom got out in ’92 and went to law school. He became a lawyer in ’95 but stayed in the reserves, taking the odd short tour and doing a bit of white collar mercenary work to retain his sanity and avoid practicing law.

  In 2003 the Army called him up to participate in the invasion of Iraq. As it turned out he had a 100% blockage in his right coronary artery and wasn’t going anywhere fun anytime soon. Instead, he languished here and there, before finally being sent on to be Director, Rule of Law, for the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute. Keep in mind the divine sense of humor.

  Retired in 2006, he’s returned to Virginia to write. His books published to date include the Countdown series, the Desert Called Peace series, three in John Ringo’s Posleen universe, plus Caliphate and A State of Disobedience. He’s also got several books worth of columns on everyjoe.com, which he’ll someday collate and assemble, as well as a number of essays on the art of war up with Baen. Tom’s married to a (really beautiful) girl from rural western Panama.