The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  It was, Simon scowled, one of the worst speeches he had ever heard. Instead of reassuring the public with carefully considered, factual information designed to relieve fears without conjuring new ones, he had dwelt on the most disturbingly negative aspects of the crisis. He had then, with fumbling stupidity, called the whole sorry disaster an atrocity — a phrase guaranteed to further upset people — and tried to pin blame on a vague threat from unknown subversives.

  It didn’t matter that he was probably right, given the evidence Simon had already gathered. Millions of people world-wide had been watching in stunned disbelief as embattled law-enforcement officials clubbed civilians to the street and gassed the crowd with riot-control chemicals. With those scenes imprinted vividly on the public consciousness, it was a very, very short step to assuming that police had also fired the paralytic agent.

  By refusing to publicly admit that possibility, President Andrews had insulted the intelligence of the entire voting populace. Regardless of who had fired those cannisters, Vittori Santorini had just accomplished his primary objective — violent disruption of the social order, necessitating strong-armed measures to bring things under control.

  Just before midnight, John Andrews issued orders imposing martial law on every urban center in Jefferson and announced a planet-wide curfew until order had been restored. Kafari was trapped for the duration. Simon spent a long, bitter, sleepless night, watching the unfolding dynamics of the situation. Armed soldiers with live ammo in their guns deprived the mobs of their ability to loot and destroy at will, so the rioters returned to their homes, switched on their computers, hooked themselves into the datanet, and churned out a flood of angry rhetoric, flaming everyone and everything connected to John Andrews and maligned the president’s personal habits, decisions, and political allies.

  POPPA’s datasite, so inundated by people trying to access the live news footage, the recorded replays of the speech and its aftermath, and the policy statements issued by Vittori Santorini and his sister, crashed the entire datanet for nearly three hours. By dawn, word had finally begun to trickle out that President Andrews had been correct in at least one critical factor: most people would recover. Ninety-eight percent of them, in fact, were ambulatory and able to return home. The agent had — thank God — been a short-duration chemical that was already degrading into an inert, harmless substance. The only casualties were those with underlying medical conditions — asthma and heart failure being the primary causes of death — and those crushed in the stampede or fatally injured when they collapsed on stairways, while driving groundcars, or operating dangerous machinery.

  At the mere suggestion that there might be evidence implicating Vittori Santorini and other high-ranking POPPA leaders, the riots flared up again, so violently that John Andrews was forced to call another press conference. “We are continuing the investigation and are conducting a thorough probe into the actions of law enforcement personnel as well as civilians and armed-forces officials. We are trying to determine whether this paralytic agent was obtained from military stockpiles held in reserve for invasion contingencies or if it was acquired recently, either through manufacture on Jefferson or purchase from off-world sources. We have no direct evidence linking this dastardly act to any individual or group. Without hard evidence, this administration cannot condone the unsupported accusations made against Vittori Santorini and his colleagues in POPPA. In the interest of ensuring public safety and protecting the civil rights of those regrettably and publicly named as potential suspects, I therefore extend presidential amnesty to any individuals or groups who might have been associated with this attack. We are asking that people return to their homes again, in the hopes that martial law and curfews will not have to be invoked again.”

  Simon just groaned, rubbing grit-filled and bloodshot eyes in a weary, frustrated gesture. Offering amnesty to people like Vittori Santorini might — just might — get people back into their homes again, but the long-term effects were staggering and dreadful in every way Simon could twist and turn the implications. Simon knew enough Terran military history to understand very thoroughly the concept of Danegeld. It was possible to buy peace, but only for a short time. Once convinced that a government was willing to capitulate to demands and threats, the Danes came back again and again, each time demanding more concessions and a higher price for continued peace.

  John Andrews had already blown his election chances out of the water. He had now blown all hope that Vittori Santorini’s uncivilized behavior would cease. Indeed, the double-damned fool had just ensured that Vittori’s methods would proliferate, unchecked and unstoppable. Jefferson’s future looked, quite abruptly, bleak as a snow-choked winter sky. The sole bright moment in Simon’s morning was Kafari’s arrival home, safe and unharmed. Exhaustion pulled her shoulders down, left her eyes bleary and her footsteps uncertain. He held onto her for long moments, then took her face in both hands. “You need some sleep,” he murmured.

  “So do you.”

  “I’ll sleep soon enough. I’ve got stimulant tablets in my system, just now. I need to stay awake until this crisis is past. But you,” he added, lifting her and carrying her into the bedroom, “are taking yourself and our daughter to bed.”

  “I’m hungry,” she protested.

  “I’ll bring you something.”

  After setting her down against the pillows, Simon put together a sandwich and some soup, carrying them into the bedroom on a tray. He halted, three strides into the room, then set the tray carefully on one corner of the dresser. Kafari was asleep. She looked more like an exhausted little girl than a woman in the advanced stages of pregnancy, who’d spent the night in a locked car with a gun in her lap. He brushed a wisp of hair back from her brow. She didn’t even stir. Very gently, Simon pulled the covers around her shoulders. He tiptoed out, retrieving her dinner on the way. He swung the door closed with a soft click of the latch. She was safely home. For the moment, that was all that mattered.

  There’d be time enough later for worrying about what happened next.

  III

  The late afternoon sun felt good on her skin as Kafari left the spaceport’s new engineering hub and headed through the employee parking area. The fresh wind, whipping inland from the sea that rolled ashore just a stone’s throw from the terminal, blew away some of the lingering distaste of a day spent in the company of people who had flocked to the POPPA cause like teglee fish to the net. She was tired of hearing the POPPA manifesto discussed with such fervent enthusiasm. Tired of biting her tongue to keep from answering with brutal honesty when co-workers asked her what it had been like, to see the great, the wondrous Santorini in person, to be right in the middle of ground zero when the police tried to murder decent, honest citizens merely expressing their opinions.

  Kafari wanted to keep her job. So she answered in monosyllables and vowed never again to tell her secretary anything about her life outside the office. Truth to tell, most of the people who’d asked breathlessly for the juicy details were disappointed to learn that she hadn’t actually been paralyzed by the gas. After a whole day spent fending off ghouls, reporters, and overzealous proselytizers convinced she could aid their cause in seeking new converts — the woman who’d saved President Lendan’s life, only to be gassed by John Andrews’ uniformed stormtroopers was, they reasoned, a photo-op too good to pass up — Kafari was on nonstop burn mode.

  When she got to her aircar, that burn exploded into molten rage. Some slimy little activist had slapped a big, ugly sticker right across the side, with rampant red letters that shouted “POPPA Knows Best!”

  “The thrice-blasted hell it does!”

  She scraped at the offensive mess in a fury worthy of a valkyrie. She succeeded in shredding her fingernails, the paint job on her beautiful new car, and what was left of her ragged temper. She finally gave up, vowing to use acid, if necessary, and simply repaint the car. She popped the driver’s hatch, levered her ungainly bulk into the seat, webbed herself in, and snarled at the psy
chotronic unit to take her to Klameth Canyon’s landing field, which had been designated as a polling place.

  For the first time in her life, Kafari resented the constitution’s attempt to reduce election fraud by insisting that each voter cast a physical ballot at a controlled polling site. The e-voting encryption methods used on Mali and Vishnu, which allowed people to vote via the datanet, had been deemed insufficiently secure by Jefferson’s founders, even though Kafari could have written the psychotronic safeguards into such a system in her sleep. The only voters allowed to cast an electronic ballot were off-world citizens, including nearly twenty-thousand soldiers now serving in the Concordiat’s armed forces.

  She briefly envied the soldiers. The last thing she wanted, tonight, was to stand in line for God alone knew how long, then fly all the way back to Nineveh Base before she could collapse with Simon and watch the election returns. Kafari leaned back against the cushions and consciously reminded herself that she was proud of her work, proud that she was helping to build a fitting legacy to a fine man’s courage and wisdom. That legacy meant more prosperity for her entire world, a labor of love in memory of a man whose death had hurt her profoundly.

  By the time her aircar touched down at Klameth Canyon field, it was nearly dark. There were so many other aircars, scooters, and even groundcars overflowing the section allotted to parking ground-based vehicles, the auto-tower routed her to a space virtually at the edge of the immense field. That was just as well, since she didn’t want anybody out here to see that wretched POPPA slogan stuck to the side of her Airdart. Kafari popped her aircar’s hatch and climbed out into the coolness of early evening, glancing up by habit to see the last of the sunlight fading from blood-red to darkness on the highest peaks of the broken, buckled, spectacularly weathered Damisi ranges.

  She shivered in the chilly autumn wind and made her way across the field, heading for the terminal that had been rebuilt by local volunteer labor. The buzz of voices was a welcome sound as she neared the long, low building that housed Klameth Canyon Airfield’s engineers, auto-tower equipment, machinery used to maintain the landing field, and storage racks for rental scooters. There was, as she’d feared, a long line, but the voices that reached out from the darkness settling rapidly over the Canyon were friendly, happy ones, engaged in the warm, relaxed conversation that had been a mainstay of Kafari’s life until her departure for school on Vishnu. There was a buoyant, comfortable quality to the way country folk spoke to one another that reached out to wrap Kafari in an almost-tangible blanket of soothing familiarity.

  When she reached the back of the line, folks paused in their conversation and turned to welcome her. “Hello, child,” a grandmotherly woman greeted her with a smile warm as pure Asali honey. “You must’ve come a far piece, tonight, to vote?”

  Kafari found herself smiling as a knot of tension, so habitual she’d nearly forgotten it was there, unwound and let her relax. “Yes, I flew in from work at the spaceport.” She grinned. “I forgot to change my residence in the database.”

  Chuckles greeted that admission, then the conversation resumed, apparently where it had left off. Talk flowed free and easy, in swirling little eddies as they moved forward, each shuffle taking them two or three steps closer to the polling station. Most of the talk revolved around the harvest.

  As they approached the big sliding doors where people paused to have their ID scanned, the station’s outdoor security lights gave Kafari a better look at those standing with her in line. That was when she noticed a young woman her own age about a meter further along, who kept turning to look back at Kafari. Like Kafari, the girl was visibly pregnant. Her lovely olive-toned complexion and features suggested Semitic ancestry. Every few moments, she would look like she wanted to say something, but was hesitant to speak. They were still about fifteen paces from the doors when she finally found the courage to walk back to where Kafari stood in line.

  “You’re Kafari Khrustinova, aren’t you?”

  Tension in her gut tightened down again. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “My name’s Chaviva Benjamin. I was just wondering… Could you give your husband a message?”

  “A message?” she echoed.

  “Well, yes. My sister Hannah volunteered to go off-world, you see. She sent a message home to us, on the freighter that came in last week, bringing parts for Ziva Two. She’s a nurse. They’ve assigned her to a naval cruiser that came in for repairs and resupply.”

  Kafari nodded, puzzled as to where this might be going.

  “Some of the navy people asked my sister where she was from, so she told them about Jefferson. And she mentioned Simon Khrustinov and his Bolo.” Again the girl hesitated, then got the rest of it out in a rush. “The ship was at Etaine, you see. During the fighting and the evacuation. They all knew who he was. Those navy people, they said…” She blinked and swallowed hard before saying, “Well, they think pretty highly of him. They told her there’s a lot your husband didn’t mention, Mrs. Khrustinova, that day the president died.”

  Kafari didn’t know what to say.

  Mrs. Benjamin said in a hushed voice, “I wish the folks on the news, here, had told us more about him, when he first came. They never mentioned the Homestar Medallion of Valor he won, the same day his Bolo earned that Gold Galactic Cluster, and I think they should have. The people on my sister’s ship said we were luckier than we knew, to have him assigned to us. Could you tell him, please, not everybody believes those idiots at POPPA? I lost both of my parents and all four of my brothers in the invasion, but Colonel Khrustinov and his Bolo aren’t to blame. No matter what people like Nassiona Santorini say about it.”

  Before Kafari could gather her stunned wits, a big rawboned man in his sixties, wearing a utility-looped belt that held the tools of a rancher’s trade, spoke up, touching the brim of a sun-bleached work hat. “Girl’s right, ma’am. I don’t rightly know what those folks in Madison use for brains. Anyone with half a set of wits can see right through all the holes in their thinkin’. There’s not two words in ten comes out of their mouths that even make sense.”

  A much older man, his face and hands as weathered as the dark cliffs above them, said harshly, “They may be stupid, but there’s a lot of ’em. I’ve been watching the folks in this voting line, same as I’ve been watching the pews of a Sunday morning and the feed and seed shops of a Saturday afternoon, and there’s hardly more’n a handful of Grangers to be seen, that’s of the age to go getting married and having babies. Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,” he offered Kafari an apologetic bow. “But facts is facts. We’ve sent the best and brightest we got out to the stars, and all their courage and good sense went with ’em. What’s left in this canyon is us old folks, mostly, and the little ones too small to go. I don’t like it, I’m telling you. Don’t like it one bit to hear those ninnies in town and then count up how many folks are left to tell ’em what nonsense they’re bleating.”

  Others chimed in, stoutly defending Simon’s good name and asking her to pass along their gratitude. The spontaneous outpouring overwhelmed her, particuarly after the bilge Nassiona Santorini had spewed all over the airwaves. Then the grandmotherly woman who’d greeted her first took both of Kafari’s hands in her own. “Child,” she said, gripping Kafari’s fingers so hard they ached, “you tell that man of yours there’s not a soul in this Canyon who thinks anything but the best about him.” Then she winked and that honey-warm smile wrapped itself around Kafari’s heart. “After all, he had the good sense to marry one of our own!”

  Chuckles greeted the observation, dispelling the tension.

  “You bring him out here, come the harvest dancing,” the older woman added, “and we’ll show him what Granger hospitality is all about.”

  Kafari smiled through a sudden mist and promised to bring Simon to the harvest festivals. Then she asked Chaviva Benjamin about the baby she carried.

  “It’s a girl,” Chaviva said, touching her own abdomen almost reverently. “Our first. My husband
, Annais, is so happy his feet hardly touch the ground, these days. She’ll be due right about time for Hannukah.”

  Kafari found herself smiling. “I’m glad for you,” she said. “Mine’s a girl, too.”

  “Good,” Chaviva said softly, meeting and holding her gaze. “We need the kind of children you and your husband are going to bring into this world.”

  Before Kafari could think of anything to say in response, it was Chaviva’s turn to slide her ID through the card reader and go inside to vote. A moment later, it was Kafari’s turn. She walked to the voting booth in a daze, marking her ballot quickly, almost slashing the pen across the slot to reelect President Andrews, then slid the ballot into the reader for tabulation and headed for her aircar.

  As she climbed in, fastened safety straps, and received permission for take-off, she lapsed into a pensive, strange little mood that was still with her when the lights from Nineveh Base and the Bolo’s maintenance depot finally greeted her from the darkness of the Adero floodplain. It was good to see the lights of home.

  Chaviva Benjamin’s words had kindled something deep in Kafari’s heart, a sweet ache that was part longing, part humble gratitude that the young woman had opened the way for others to share how much she and Simon meant to them. It would be very easy, working where she did, to lose sight of the simple, forthright concern for others that was a hallmark of the world Kafari had grown up in, a world very different from the one she had found in Madison.