Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation Read online

  Table of Contents

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  1. The Long, Dark Goodnight by Vivienne Raper

  INTERLUDE

  2. The Raiders by Mike Massa

  INTERLUDE

  3. Sacrifice by Peter Grant

  INTERLUDE

  4. Doing Well by Doing Good by Chris Nuttall

  INTERLUDE

  5. No Hypocritical Oath by Robert E. Hampson

  INTERLUDE

  6. Bellona’s GIFT by Monalisa Foster

  INTERLUDE

  7. The Panther Men by Justin Watson

  INTERLUDE

  8. Desertion by Kacey Ezell

  INTERLUDE

  9. Blood, Sweat, and Tears by Christopher L. Smith

  INTERLUDE

  10. Wellington by Alexander Macris

  INTERLUDE

  11. HUÁNUCO by Lawrence Railey

  INTERLUDE

  12. The Redeemer by Tom Kratman

  POSTSCRIPT

  AFTERWORD

  FOOTNOTES

  TERRA NOVA

  The WARS OF LIBERATION

  Edited by

  TOM KRATMAN

  Terra Nova: The Wars of Liberation

  edited by Tom Kratman

  New stories set in Tom Kratman's hard-hitting Carrera military sf series

  "Send us your tired, your poor," says the inscription at the base of the great statue, "your huddled masses yearning to be free."

  But the future of the colony planet, Terra Nova, and its relations with Old Earth is far more a case of "boot out your tired, your poor, your dissidents and troublemakers. Use us for a dumping ground for all your problems. Go ahead and abandon these here." This may have been fine, too, but for the UN and its corrupt bureaucracy insisting on maintaining control and milking the new world and its settlers, willing and unwilling both, bone dry.

  Contained herein are tales of the history of Mankind's future first colony, from the first failed attempt at colonization, to the rise in crime, to the rise in terrorism, to its descent into widespread civil war and rebellion...and ultimately liberation. As with most of human history, this history is messy, with good men and women turning bad, bad men and women inadvertently doing good, and blood flowing in the streets.

  Stories set in Tom Kratman’s Carrera series by

  Kasey Ezell

  Mike Massa

  Rob Hampson

  Chris Smith

  Peter Grant

  Chris Nutall

  Justin Watson

  Monalisa Foster

  Alex Macris

  Lawrence Railey

  and Tom Kratman

  BAEN BOOKS

  by TOM KRATMAN

  A State of Disobedience

  A Desert Called Peace

  Carnifex

  The Lotus Eaters

  The Amazon Legion

  Come and Take Them

  The Rods and the Axe

  A Pillar of Fire by Night

  Caliphate

  Countdown: The Liberators

  Countdown: M Day

  Countdown: H Hour

  with John Ringo

  Watch on the Rhine

  Yellow Eyes

  The Tuloriad

  Edited by Tom Kratman

  Terra Nova

  Terra Nova

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  “The Long, Dark Goodnight,” copyright © 2019 by Vivienne Raper; “The Raiders,” copyright © 2019 by Mike Massa; “Sacrifice,” copyright © 2019 by Peter Grant; “Doing Well by Doing Good,” copyright © 2019 by Chris Nuttall; “No Hypocritical Oath,” copyright © 2019 by Robert E. Hampson; “Bellona’s Gift,” copyright © 2019 by Monalisa Foster; “The Panther Men,” copyright © 2019 by Justin Watston; “The Deserter,” copyright © 2019 by Kacey Ezell; “Blood, Sweat, and Tears,” copyright © 2019 by Chris Smith; “Wellington,” copyright © 2019 by Alexander Macris; “Huanuco,” copyright © 2019 by Lawrence Railey; “The Redeemer,” copyright © 2019 by Tom Kratman.

  All other content copyright © 2019 by Tom Kratman.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8416-9

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-722-3

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen printing August, 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kratman, Tom, editor.

  Title: Terra Nova : the wars of liberation / edited by Tom Kratman.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019021555 | ISBN 9781481484169 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction, American. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction

  / Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Science

  Fiction / Short Stories.

  Classification: LCC PS648.S3 T428 2019 | DDC 813/.0876208--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021555

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To:

  Julia, Inez, Sarah,

  Juliana, Patrick, and Cossima

  PROLOGUE:

  From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation

  There is an old saying, originating, we believe, on the mother world, to the effect that “you are what you were back when.” We, here, on the new world, a world of war, the world we call “Terra Nova” or something that means just that in some other language, know this better than most.

  The whole planet knows the story of the first colonization effort for Terra Nova, under the aegis of what was then Earth’s United Nations, via the Colonization Ship Cheng Ho, how order broke down and then morphed into a shipboard civil war.

  We have two well-known versions of the story, of course. One is the story given us by the Earthwoman, Marjorie Billings-Rajamana, who was among the few survivors and whose tale of events—an escalating ethnic and religious breakdown, centered on Islamic intolerance and belligerence, which was smuggled out from Earth through what must have been a maze of censorship. The other, maintained to this day by the more progressive elements of this planet and all of the United Earth Peace Fleet, lays all blame on mechanical and technological problems, exacerbated by Christian opposition to science, with prominent place given to those same Moslems as self-sacrificing saviors of those who managed to survive.

  What actually happened we are unlikely ever to know . . .

  1.

  The Long, Dark Goodnight

  Vivienne Raper1

  I saw a lot of death as a copper. Accidental suicides, drug overdoses . . . I once saw a bloke with the back of his head blown off and his face flopped over his neck like a mask. Most of them didn’t get to me—I could block it out somehow.

  But the dead kids got to me. Still get to me, even here, in this spinning can, billions of miles from Mother Earth.

  The girl lying in the mortuary drawer had thick, long dark hair and smooth caramel skin. Her slim hands were folded in the lap of her hospital gown. There wasn’t a mark on her. When they look like that, you half expect them to climb off the tray.

  “What happened?” I asked.

&n
bsp; Angel, the senior doctor, pulled open a second drawer. “Besma came in with her boyfriend. They both had headache and dizziness. She was worried about the baby.”

  I nodded. Last time I’d seen this girl, she was waiting for a checkup. Sixteen years old. Twenty-three weeks pregnant. Now she was dead. Angel rolled back the sheet on the second corpse: thick blond hair, acne scars on both cheeks, long rectangular jaw—the boyfriend. Seventeen last month. Both of them, still just kids.

  I smoothed the sheet back over his face. “Any idea on cause of death?”

  Angel shook her head.

  You get a hunch sometimes, when you’ve been working as a cop. I joke that it’s my spidey sense, yes, after the superhero. It’s this niggling itch that you’re not getting the full story.

  I looked at Angel closely. She was a small, slim woman with freshly-ironed scrubs, her hair in a neat black bob. Not chatty like the nurses in MedLab, she’d worked in a private hospital in Manila and had one of the bigger cabins on A Deck. Her lips were pressed into a tight line.

  “What about cause of illness?” I asked.

  Her lips twitched. “We had an equipment failure. We’ve been monitoring patients, but . . .” She shrugged, unhappily.

  “What caused that?” I asked.

  “Local computer issues. We’ve called out an engineer.”

  She folded her arms. I took a couple of deep breaths. I pride myself on acting professional but, as I say, dead kids get to me. “It’s my job to ask these questions,” I said in a softer voice.

  “Tony . . . I know.” She lowered her head.

  Asked her some easy questions. The kids came in two days before. They were okay until they weren’t. MedLab treated their symptoms but—with the equipment gremlins, the cramped and crowded clinic—there wasn’t much they could do. She rolled the corpses back into the cabinet and I couldn’t help looking at the soft swell of the girl’s belly.

  “What happened to the baby?” I asked.

  “Emergency caesarean,” she said.

  Didn’t want to ask. “Alive?”

  She made a seesaw motion with her hands. “Touch and go.”

  I went to see the baby. She was squirming about in a clear plastic bag, hanging on a rail, with black tubing emerging from her navel. I watched her for a while—the first baby born in space. She was red, with veins on her knees. Her little hands were clenching and unclenching. I could have held her in the palm of my hand.

  They’d told the crew and colonists not to have kids. We had a talk on precautions in basic training. Not to get political about it, but we needed it—half the colonists on the Cheng Ho are teens. A physicist from NASA flew over to present on cosmic rays and brain damage. “Forget life insurance,” he’d said; “you can’t afford the premium.”

  Not that I needed life insurance.

  My daughter died six years ago; killed by a drunken scrote in an uninsured car, crossing the road on her walk home from school. He got community service and a disqualification. I kept calm watching him laugh his way out of court. My wife never got over it. Our marriage didn’t survive it either. I was a sergeant in the Met serving London south of the river. I knew I’d either get cynical about road traffic or I’d get fanatical. I didn’t want to get either.

  When they advertised for a security officer with European policing experience for a UN mission to the new world, Terra Nova, I had nothing to lose. I’d always been a bit of a science fiction geek. Asimov, Heinlein, the old stuff—reading it under the covers until midnight as a kid.

  Lizzie, the Scottish nurse, handed me a mug of tea. “She’s doing well for a wee one, given what a hard time she’s had,” she said, nodding at the baby.

  I cupped the warm mug in my hands. Lizzie was a Brit, like me—or close enough, anyway—and I liked her for it. The familiarity of home.

  “You were monitoring the girl, weren’t you?” I asked.

  Lizzie rubbed her eyes. “Yes, sweet lass she was. Excited about the bairn. A bit scared too, to tell you the truth, but the wee one was developing well enough.”

  “No sign of suicide?”

  “No. Not a hint of it.” She grimaced and rubbed her eyes again. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Forgive me, I’m blubbering like a bairn myself.”

  Waiting for her to get it together, I prised the ‘low-pressure’ lid off the mug. The tea was lukewarm. You can’t boil water properly with the air pressures you get aboard ship. I sipped the tea: it tasted of powdered milk. Motorway service station tea on the highway to the stars.

  I handed the mug back to Lizzie. “Anything physically wrong with Besma?”

  She looked straight into my eyes.

  “Ach, if you ask me, the only thing wrong with Besma was her father, the sexist Arab bastard. If you’re looking for who killed her, you should talk to him.”

  I inwardly groaned at that. I’d arrested Dr. Akbar al Damer, Besma’s father, a month back. My mate Jamal and I responded to a call of a male shouting and being disruptive in what had become the ‘European quarter’ on B Deck.

  No sign of a weapon, but it was 23:00, and the people in the nearby cabins were wanting to get some sleep. The Portuguese woman who called OpSec (the nick) thought he was shouting in Arabic—so, before I could attend the disturbance, I had to get Jamal out of bed.

  Jamal was the UN Africa Group liaison. He was pretty cheesed off at me for getting him up, but—as I said to him—he was the only member of our team who spoke Arabic.

  The way policing works on the Cheng Ho is a bit like policing in international waters—the 120 nationalities onboard are subject to their own laws. What this means in practice is 120 different bodies of law, policed by six security officers who need to be on call 24/7 in case—for example—an Indian and a South African get hammered and into a fight.

  I’d like to say that drunks on the Cheng Ho were rare, but we get about two calls a week dealing with people lying in the corridors. The week before, I’d arrested a bootleg brewer who’d been cooking up moonshine in the botany lab. Space makes people go mental. It’s the isolation, seeing the Earth receding behind you, being on a one-way mission . . . some find God. Some go berserk. The rest get drunk.

  They’ve even got a name for it—the Lunar Effect.

  As it was, Dr. al Damer was an observant Muslim who frowned upon alcohol, and especially his teenage daughter getting pregnant after drinking it with her German boyfriend. Not that I blamed him, really. When we arrived, he was trying to have it out with the boyfriend by hammering on his cabin door and threatening to murder him (in heavily-accented German, as it turned out).

  The minute he saw us, he left off banging on the door and planted himself in front of Jamal. “”2 he said, indignantly.

  (I didn’t need a translation. He was demanding Jamal “do something”—like every bloke with an exaggerated sense of his own importance I’d ever met on the job.)

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “Officer, my daughter has been kidnapped! By a German boy,” he said, gesturing. “She is in this boy’s cabin.”

  I advised al Damer to vacate the area as security were now in attendance (or, at least, that’s what I put in my report). He started ranting that this was about his daughter and a private matter—somewhat surprising as five minutes before Jamal told me he’d wanted us to break into the cabin.

  Jamal warned him under Section 5 of the Public Order Act (or the Saudi equivalent, at least) and took a firm grip of his arm to pull him away from the door. Whereupon, he resisted, so I assisted by pulling his arms behind his back and cuffing him. Then Jamal dragged him, shouting and kicking, away from the cabin and I knocked on the door.

  It turned out that Besma had run away to her boyfriend’s cabin earlier that evening—after finally telling her dad she was twenty weeks pregnant.

  “I knew he’d go crazy,” she said. “I was scared of him. When I told him, he told me he wouldn’t let me leave.”

  Back at OpSec, al Damer was ranting on about how h
e was an eminent Saudi chemist and was going to make a complaint to the authorities back on Earth. Part of my job, as it’s turned out, has been top-level diplomat. When any jumped-up scrote can claim that the reason they were restrained, drunk and in a fight, is because of geopolitics back on Earth, it makes security harder for everyone.

  Luckily, as the mission’s gone on, it’s become clearer; if we were a bunch of nationalist thugs, Terran bureaucrats couldn’t do a thing about it.

  I explained this to al Damer. Then I explained the onboard contract where he agreed to keep away from his daughter, and I didn’t throw him into the brig.

  “But she’s my daughter,” he protested. “She’s my responsibility.”

  “She’s the responsibility of the ship,” I said.

  I left him in the brig while we called an emergency shipboard summit. This was the first pregnancy aboard ship. The girl was risking her life—and that of the baby. We needed the medical team to look her over.

  As we waited, Jamal told me a story about two Saudi girls who wanted to go on “adventures,” aka dates. The strict dad drowned his daughter in their swimming pool, in full view of the family, to put off any other girls. The tolerant father locked his daughter in an attic and fed her through a slit in the door. She died a few years later.

  “That book was banned in Saudi, but people read it in secret,” said Jamal, who’d lived there a few years.

  “Al Damer is a tolerant father?” I asked.