The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  Simon had dinner waiting when she walked through the door. She went straight to him, put both arms around him, and just held on for a long moment.

  “Rough day?” he asked, stroking her hair.

  She nodded. “Yeah. You?”

  “I’ve had better.”

  She gave Simon a kiss. She wanted to ask him about the medal of valor, which she hadn’t known about, but remained silent. Since he hadn’t shared it with anyone on Jefferson, including her, he clearly preferred not to be reminded of the circumstances under which he’d earned it. So she contented herself with passing along the messages from Chaviva Benjamin and the others.

  Simon stared down into her eyes for a long moment, then looked away and sighed. “An officer knows his actions won’t always be popular, but it’s never pleasant to be vilified.” He didn’t say anything more, however, which worried Kafari. He wasn’t telling her something. From the sound of his voice, it was an important something. Kafari understood that Simon’s job involved military secrets, things she would probably never be privy to, and doubtless wouldn’t want to know, even if he told her.

  But she wanted to help him, wanted to know what to do and say that would ease the burden on his shoulders. She couldn’t do that if she didn’t know what was eating away at him like a cutworm in a healthy cabbage patch. She also wanted to know if something Nassiona Santorini had said was actually true or not.

  “Simon?”

  He frowned. “That sounds unhappy.”

  “While I was at the clinic, I heard part of an interview with Nassiona Santorini.”

  A muscle in his jaw jumped. “What about Ms. Santorini?”

  Kafari hesitated as her gut twisted. She’d realized a few seconds too late that anything she said now would sound like she didn’t trust her husband. She swore aloud and pulled away, damning herself as she waddled into the kitchen. She cracked open a bottle of nonalcoholic beer with a savage yank and gulped half its contents in one long pull, trying to calm the sudden, painful clenching in her stomach.

  “Kafari?” he asked quietly.

  She turned to face him across the distance of their living room. “Why is Sonny still awake?”

  She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see, but it wasn’t the faint smile twitched at his lips. “Is that all? I was afraid you were going to ask what ‘that machine’ and I are legally allowed to do.”

  She swallowed convulsively. “And you can’t answer that?”

  He sighed again. “I’d rather not.”

  Which gave Kafari a fair idea about the answer, but she wasn’t about to push him. “That’s okay with me, Simon,” she said quietly. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

  “No, I haven’t. Do you have to stand all the way across the room?”

  She flushed and headed back for his arms, which closed around her with great tenderness. He leaned his cheek against her hair, then spoke. “There are a couple of reasons, actually. The main one is simple enough. Another breakthrough from the Void is still a very real threat. I want Sonny to stay awake. To keep track of exactly where our various defense forces have been deployed. If I shut him down and we get a breakthrough, again, he would have to spend critical time figuring out where everybody is, before the Deng or the Melconians hit us. You’ve seen how fast interstellar battle fleets can cross a star system.”

  She shivered silently against his chest.

  “As to the other reasons…” He sighed again. “Let’s just say that Abraham Lendan thought it was a good idea.”

  She caught her breath and looked up, surprised by the hard, angry glitter in his eyes. “Why?”

  A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Because he was a very astute statesman. And a superlative judge of human character. I doubt that even one Jeffersonian in five thousand realizes just how much this world lost when he died. It’s my fervent hope,” Simon added roughly, “that he was wrong.”

  A chill slithered its way down Kafari’s back. What did Simon know? What had President Lendan known? If President Lendan had known about the trouble POPPA was brewing…

  “Are you afraid of Sonny?” Simon asked abruptly.

  She hesitated for just a moment, then opted for the simple truth. “Yes. I am.”

  “Good.” She stared up at her husband. Simon’s eyes were dark, filled with shadows of a different shape and hue than she’d seen there before. He said gently, “Only a fool isn’t afraid of a Bolo. The more you know about them, the more true that becomes. Officers assigned to the Brigade go through a whole battery of psychology courses before ever setting foot inside a Command Compartment. With Sonny, I had to take special training courses, because he won’t react the same way as Bolos with more sophisticated hardware and programming.”

  He touched her cheek with a whisper-soft fingertip. “You’re my wife and Sonny knows that. He considers you a friend, which is a high compliment. But you aren’t his commander. He isn’t programmed to respond to you at a commander’s level of trust. Or, more accurately, a commander’s level of engineered obedience. His threat-level threshold can be crossed and reacted to faster than you or any human could hope to defuse the situation. Sonny’s an intelligent, self-directing machine. Anything with a mind of its own is unpredictable. With Sonny, there are landmines you could trip without even realizing it. I’d really rather not find out what would happen if you did.”

  A tightly coiled tension around her bones unwound a little, hearing Simon confirm what she had known, at a deep level. Kafari nodded. “All right.”

  One eyebrow twitched upwards. “All right? That’s it?”

  She produced a grin that surprised him into widening his eyes. “Well, yes. There are times when Sonny is as darling as a child and times when he scares me to death. If the needle-gun I carry every day could think for itself, I’d feel a whole lot differently about it, before sticking the thing into my pocket. I like Sonny. But I’d be crazy to trust him.”

  “Mrs. Khrustinova, you are a remarkable lady.”

  “Then you’d better feed me, so I don’t leave you for a better short-order cook!”

  Simon gave her a swift kiss, then swatted her backside and propelled her toward the table. They ate in silence, which Kafari needed, after the day she’d put in. She made only one reference to the unpleasantness in town. “Do you have anything in Sonny’s depot that would take off plasti-bond stuck to metal?”

  Simon frowned. “Probably. Why?”

  “Some jerk wallpapered every aircar in the lot with election slogans.”

  His lips twitched. “I see. I take it, from your description of the perpetrator, that you weren’t in agreement with the sentiment it expressed?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Huh. I suspect you have a gift for understatement. Yes, I think I can scrounge something that would do the trick. Will we need to have the car repainted?”

  “How in the world did you know?”

  Simon chuckled. “My dear, I’ve seen you attack things you don’t like.”

  “Oh.” She managed a smile. “Yes, we’ll need to repaint the car.”

  They lingered over dessert and washed the dishes together, then wandered into the living room. Quirking a questioning brow at Kafari, Simon nodded toward the datascreen. She sighed and nodded. As much as she hated to spoil the mood, it was time to watch the election returns. Simon switched it on and reached for Kafari’s feet, giving them a gentle and thorough rubdown that left her all but purring.

  The picture that greeted them, however, soured Kafari’s dinner. She recognized the young attorney speaking with Pol Jankovitch. The journalist apparently harbored a prediliction for attractive POPPA spokeswomen. Isanah Renke’s long blond hair and dazzling Teutonic smile had popped up all too frequently, over the last several months. So had her favorite spiel, which she was pouring forth yet again.

  “—tired of John Andrews waving thick stacks of data in front of people while rattling off excuses for the economy’s slide toward disaster. We’ve had enough. Jeff
erson can’t afford complicated bureaucratic double-speak and worn-out wheezes about chaotic money markets and arcane budgeting processes. Even attorneys can’t unravel this administration’s so-called budget plan. The POPPA economic platform is simple and straightforward. We need to put money in the hands of the people who need it. That’s why Gifre Zeloc has endorsed POPPA’s economic-recovery inititatives.”

  “What are the most important points of those initiatives, Isanah?”

  “It’s very simple, Pol. The most important component of POPPA’s economic recovery plan is an immediate end to the current administration’s loan schemes.”

  “John Andrews and his analysts insist that economic development loans are critical to rebuilding our manufacturing and retail industries.”

  “We do need to rebuild, Pol, urgently. But loan schemes do nothing to address the deeper problems our economy faces. And loan schemes place an unjust burden on struggling businesses. Loans force companies, particularly small retailers, into merciless repayment schedules. You must understand, Pol, these loans have draconian forfeiture penalties built into them. If a business can’t meet repayment demands on time, the owner faces outrageously unfair punishments, including governmental seizure of property! We’re talking about people losing their homes, their livelihoods, just to satisfy legal requirements attached to money these businesses must have to recover. It’s outrageous. It’s government-sanctioned blackmail. It’s got to stop, Pol, it’s got to stop now.”

  Kafari reflected sourly that POPPA’s campaign slogan should have been “it’s got to stop now,” since it was the favorite phrase of every spokesperson POPPA had recruited for fieldwork, followed closely by “we’ve had enough” of whatever they were preparing to demonize and vilify next.

  Pol Jankovitch’s expression mirrored horror. “How can a business function if the government confiscates its property? A business can’t operate without an inventory of goods, equipment, or buildings! It certainly can’t operate if it loses the land it sits on!”

  “Huh,” Kafari muttered, “a farmer can’t grow anything on land he loses, either. How come nobody’s pointing that out?”

  Simon, voice tight with anger, said, “Because saying it doesn’t match their agenda.”

  Again, Kafari wondered what Simon knew, what Abe Lendan had known.

  On the datascreen, Isanah Renke was saying, “You’re right, Pol. Businesses can’t operate that way. Under these loan schemes, the owner loses everything he or she has spent a lifetime trying to build. And the people working in that business lose their jobs. Everyone suffers. John Andrews’ insane economic recovery plan is deliberately engineered to punish those least able to guarantee sustainable profits. Unfair loan practices must go. Otherwise this world faces certain economic disaster.”

  “And POPPA has a better plan?”

  “Absolutely. We need grants and economic aid packages designed to guarantee recovery for hard-hit businesses. We’re talking about industries that can’t recover under the convoluted, unwieldly, economically disastrous nonsense contained in John Andrews’ so-called recovery plan. It’s lunacy, Pol, sheer lunacy.”

  Kafari scowled at the screen. “Doesn’t anybody in that broadcasting firm pay attention to regulations about what can be said in a datacast before the polls close?”

  The harsh metallic bite in Simon’s voice surprised Kafari. “Isanah Renke is not a registered candidate. She’s not a member of a candidate’s staff. She isn’t a registered lobbyist and she doesn’t draw a salary from POPPA. Neither,” he added with a vicious growl, “does Nassiona Santorini.”

  Kafari stared at him for a moment, trying to take in the implications. “You can’t tell me they work for free?”

  Simon shook his head. “They don’t. But the shellgame they’re playing with holding companies is technically legal, so there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Vittori and Nassiona Santorini are the children of a crackerjack industrialist. They know exactly how to tapdance their way through the corporate legal landscape. And they’ve hired attorneys with plenty of experience doing it. People like Isanah Renke tell them exactly how to accomplish questionable activities without running afoul of inconvenient legislation, court rulings, and administrative policies.”

  Kafari knew he’d been watching the Santorinis since that first riot on campus, but he’d just revealed more in two minutes than Kafari had learned in the past six months. Nassiona Santorini’s allegation that Sonny was watching night and day had unsettled her, which was a strong indication of how powerful that argument was. It had caused Kafari to question the actions and motives of a man she trusted implicitly to safeguard her homeworld and act in its best interests.

  Would Kafari’s reaction, would her indignant anger over POPPA’s allegations, be different if she’d learned that Sonny was watching Grangers as closely as the machine was watching POPPA? It wasn’t a comfortable thought. That kind of surveillance was a two-edged sword. She was abruptly glad that Simon Khrustinov was the one wielding it. Were all Brigade officers chosen for their unswerving integrity, as well as honor, loyalty, courage, and every other trait that made Simon a consummate Brigade officer and the finest human being she had ever known?

  As the evening droned on, with voting tallies showing massive POPPA victories in the urban centers and strong support for John Andrews in the rural areas, Pol Jankovitch made a show, at least, of interviewing spokespersons from both parties, but there wasn’t much to hold her attention in the sound bites supporting the current administration. It might’ve been that she was simply in philosophical agreement with them, or maybe the trouble was that she already knew everything they were saying. When she found herself yawning against Simon’s shoulder, she wondered a little sleepily if the dry presentations that failed to hold her interest could possibly be an orchestrated effort on somebody’s part. She had just about decided she was being a little too paranoid when Pol Jankovitch dropped a bombshell that sent her bolt upright in her seat.

  “We’ve just been informed,” Pol said, interrupting an economic analyst trying to explain why POPPA’s ideas weren’t economically tenable, “that the electronic returns sent by off-world troops via SWIFT have been scrambled during transmission. We’re trying to find out the magnitude of the problem. We’re patching through to Lurlina Serhild, our correspondent at the Elections Commission headquarters. Lurlina, are you there?”

  A moment of dead air was followed by a woman’s voice a split second before Special Correspondent Lurlina Serhild appeared on screen. “Yes, Pol, we’ve been told to stand by for a special report from the Elections Commission. It’s our understanding that the commissioner will be issuing an advisory within the next few minutes. Everyone here is tense and distressed—” She stopped, then said, “It looks like the commssioner’s press secretary is ready to make a statement.”

  A harried-looking woman in a rumpled suit came on screen, moving decisively to a podium bearing the logo of the Jeffersonian Independent Elections Commission.

  “All we know at this time is that an unknown number of absentee ballots have been properly credited, while an unknown number of others have been lost in the data glitch. We are trying to unscramble this serious transmission error, but we can’t determine at this time how long it will take to discover the magnitude of the problem. Our system engineers are working frantically to untangle the glitch in time to meet the legal deadline for final vote tallies.”

  A tendril of sudden, strong dismay threaded its way through Kafari’s perpetually queasy middle. Those deadlines were short. Very short. The next moment, the commissioner’s press secretary explained why. “The constitution was drafted with reliance on stable computerized tabulation systems designed to count physical ballots. Given the small size of Jefferson’s population at the time the constitution was ratified, the tabulation deadlines did not take into account the necessity for massive numbers of off-world, absentee ballots.

  “This is the first time in Jefferson’s history that we�
��ve had more than a hundred absentee ballots transmitted from off-world. These votes require a translation protocol to decode SWIFT data. Somewhere in the translation process or in the transfer protocols that regulate deciphered data-feeds into the balloting computers, a serious error occurred. It scrambled the stream of incoming code and wrecked our ability to trace which ballots lost data integrity.

  “We can’t tell at this juncture how many ballots from the original SWIFT message were in the translation processors, how many had been incorporated into the master tallies, and which had not yet been processed when the system failed. As little as twenty percent of the ballots might be affected, but our system engineers fear the number of ballots caught in the translator when it crashed may have been closer to eighty or ninety percent.

  “The Elections Commissioner takes full responsibility for this difficulty and promises every possible effort to ensure the correct tabulation of absentee votes. We will issue an update when we know more. No, I’m sorry, no questions at this time, please, that’s everything I can tell you.”

  Simon was running a distracted hand through his hair, leaving it disheveled. The anger in his steel-hued eyes surprised her, but what he said left Kafari stunned. He jerked to his feet, pacing the living room like a caged cat, thinking out loud. “They didn’t need to do something like this. They already had the election, those voting patterns make it pitifully obvious. They didn’t need to commit election fraud. So why the hell did they do it? To rub salt in an open wound? No, there’s more to it than that. It’s a message, loud and clear. A demonstration of power. And contempt. They’re telling the rest of us, ‘We can cheat so skillfully, you can’t touch us.’ And they’re right, curse it. We can’t. Not without proof.”

  Kafari watched him in horrified silence. What information had he been in possession of, to prompt an accusation of election fraud? Was that what Abraham Lendan had suspected, when he’d promoted Simon to colonel? If somebody had realized POPPA was conspiring to cheat, why hadn’t anybody done anything about it?