The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  “Thank you, Captain. I’ll be in touch.”

  Her chrono read 4:38 p.m. when Kafari spotted what looked like the trouble with the module’s controlling code. “Aha! Gotcha, you wriggly little beast.”

  She rattled keys, uttered voice commands, and punched “send.” The Ziva Two Module in orbit hummed and spat back an answer. “Yes!” Kafari crowed. The docking fees switched to exactly what they were supposed to read. She informed Captain Aditi, who ran a hand through her short hair and said, “Honey, I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve got my thanks. I don’t fly this bird for some big trade cartel, this is my ship. It’s got all my money in it, and between you, me, and the fencepost, trying to pay that fee would’ve run me so far into the red, I’d never get another license to dock at Ziva Two. Not with what’s in my cash reserves.”

  “Understood, Captain. I’m just glad I could be of some service.”

  “Honey, ‘some service’ is telling a customer, ‘I typed your request into the maintenance logbook, where it will be reviewed by our computer intelligence system.’ What you did, angel, was save my job, my ship, and my grandkids’ inheritance. You want something, child, you just ask for it, you understand me?”

  “Yes, I do,” Kafari smiled. “And thanks, I’ll keep you in mind.”

  She was starting to close up her office, ready to head home, when her wrist-comm beeped. She touched controls. “Kafari Khrustinova.”

  “Turn on the news,” her father’s voice said, harsh with anger. “Dinny Ghamal’s been arrested.”

  “What?” She whipped around to her computer, found a newsflash headline that screamed, Granger terrorists massacre peaceful demonstrators! Her gut constricted so painfully, her breath expelled with an audible whoosh. “Oh, my God…”

  Kafari knew the house, had stopped a couple of times, on her way home from work, to visit Dinny and Aisha and Emmeline Ghamal. It was the PSF barracks house operated by the Hancock Family Cooperative, on the Adero floodplain. The Hancock family members were among the most decent, honest people anywhere on Jefferson. What could possibly have gone wrong, for an accusation like that to be thrown at them?

  The farmyard was full of emergency vehicles, most of them bearing the emblem of the infamous federal police force known colloquially as P-Squads. Men in coroners’ uniforms were carrying out body bags. Lots of them. Pol Jankovitch was putting on a great show for his spectators, flashing photographs of fifteen victims, all of whom looked like school children. Pol, whose performance tottered back and forth across a line between stern outrage and hushed grief, was saying, ”… peaceful protestors, just ordinary boys anxious to focus public attention on the farm crisis. All they wanted to do was show people the truth about food hoarding. They didn’t even have to drive far from home to prove their point.

  “This house,” he pointed toward the almost military-style barracks the Hancock Family Cooperative had been forced to rent at premium rates, “is part of a government-owned Populist Support Farm just three and a half kilometers from Port Town. The poorest children on Jefferson live next door to farms like this one, where barns are bulging with high-quality food those children will never see.”

  You buggering snake! She closed her hands around the edge of her desk, so tightly her palms hurt. The Hancock family — like thousands of other Grangers forced into the Populist Support Farm System — worked under slave-labor conditions on PSF before trudging home to put in more hours working their own land. Not one ounce of PSF food went into a Granger’s mouth. They ate only the food they could grow on their own land, unless they wanted to risk prison and rehab. If PSF food wasn’t being distributed to the poor, Kafari wanted to know just who the hell was getting it.

  She clicked through coverage from every major broadcasting company on Jefferson, just to ground herself in the official version of things. Then she went to Anish Balin’s Sounding the Alarm datachat. Rather, she tried to go there. It took nearly five full minutes to gain access, which told her a great deal about the number of people trying to get in. Anish Balin’s hard-hitting and argumentative style had drawn a lot of fire, even amongst the Granger community. People who worried about Grangers’ public image and reprisals were afraid of someone as outspoken and seemingly paranoid as the self-styled Fearless Firebrand.

  When she finally got in, the whole screen lit up with two brutal words: FIRST LIE!

  Thirty photographs popped up, in two columns. The left-hand side showed the same images Pol Jankovitch and the other sludge slingers were distributing. The right-hand column showed a different set of photographs. On the left were fifteen boys. Kids with hardened, street-tough faces, but obviously no more than twelve or thirteen years old. On the right, were fifteen corresponding young men, husky with adult musculature, sporting moustaches, nano-tatts, and lip-plugs. The youngest was, at a bare minimum, twenty-two or twenty-three. It was clear that these were, in fact, the same individuals. You could see it in bone structure, the placement and angle of ears, the shape and cleft of chins. “First lie” was right. Pol Jankovitch’s “peaceful protestors” and “ordinary boys” were a decade older than the photos he was plastering all over his broadcast. When the screen auto-faded to the next page, which screamed SECOND LIE! Kafari’s shock gave way to jaw-crunching rage.

  Since the Hancock Family Co-op was large enough to have more than a dozen children under the age of two, POPPA had installed security cameras throughout the PSF barracks to ensure the “safety and social welfare” of the toddlers and infants while their parents worked in the government’s fields and barns. Such cameras were standard features at PSF “homes” throughout Jefferson, auto-programmed to begin recording whenever motion and sound sensors determined that a PSF crew had arrived to log their mandatory fifty hours a week in public fields.

  Those cameras had been running when Pol Jankovitch’s “protestors” burst into the house. Anish Balin had managed to hack into the PSF security system, downloading the video before the P-Squads got there. He was replaying it in a perpetual loop. The security cameras — three of them, one covering the mess hall and kitchen, one covering the nursery and play area, and one covering the sleeping dormitory — caught the confusion and screams caused by fifteen grown men literally kicking the door off its hinges. The gutter patois they started shouting identified them instantly as members of a Port Town rat-gang. So called for their habit of preying on “space rats” — freighter crews who operated the cargo shuttles between spacedock at Ziva Two and Port Abraham — they were the most vicious urban criminals ever bred on Jefferson, although the P-Squads occasionally gave them a good run for the money.

  The rat-gang burst into the house, wearing masks and brandishing weapons. The only people in the house were grandmothers and little ones too young for federally mandated daycare. The gang rounded everybody up and herded them into the dormitory that served as bedroom. What happened next…

  Kafari felt sick to the basement of her soul.

  The ones not busy having fun with their victims were rushing through the house, ordered by their leaders to ransack nearby storage sheds and barns and raid the vegetable plots and smokehouse, looting everything that looked remotely edible or valuable enough to sell. Kafari’s breath caught when she recognized Aisha Ghamal.

  The camera revealed what the rat-gangers hadn’t seen — she’d managed to key an emergency alarm on her wrist-comm without being seen by her captors, sending a distress call to the planetary emergency system. Anish Balin had managed to download the official response to that emergency call: a recording that said, “All local law enforcement agents are busy. Your complaint will be forwarded to the appropriate department in charge of vandalism and petty theft. Have a nice day.”

  Two and a half minutes after that message went out, rat-gangers who’d been looting outside burst back into the house, yelling a warning at their friends. Zippers went up in haste as they broke out windows to shoot at targets outside. Aisha’s message had gone out to family members in the fields, as well as the
police.

  In the confusion that erupted, with rat-gangers firing through the windows, dodging back to avoid return fire and reloading their weapons, Aisha Ghamal dove under a barracks-room bed, knocking it over with a crash. She came up with a handgun concealed under the bed frame. She fired repeatedly, taking down two of the men at the windows. Most of the gang scattered, diving for cover, but one of the bastards stood his ground. They centered one another simultaneously. Aisha beat him to the trigger pull—

  —and her gun just clicked. She’d shot it dry.

  “Fuckin’ jomo bitch!” he snarled. Then he shot her, high in the chest. She spun and dropped, going down with a gasping cry of pain and a spattering of blood across her dress, the overturned bed, the wall. She hit the floor just as the door burst open. The men and women shooting their way into the house showed no mercy. Cold hatred had turned their faces to stone. They were beyond angry, beyond anything human. POPPA had worked them nearly to death, had confiscated their crops, their money, in some cases their land.

  And now a stinking rat-gang had smashed its way into their lives, bent on torture and destruction. The Hancock adults fired and fired and fired, shooting every single member of the gang, pumping extra rounds into anyone whose fingers even twitched around a weapon. Kafari sat with the back of her hand pressed against her lips, shaking and crying at the slaughter on screen.

  She recognized Dinny Ghamal, recognized his new bride, Emmeline, a sweet girl who thought the sun rose and set in her husband — an opinion that was, in Kafari’s opinion, fully justified. Dinny rushed to his mother’s side. Aisha was alive, but badly injured and lying in a spreading pool of blood. Someone was shouting “Call the police! Call for ambulances!” while others got the children out of the killing zone.

  One of the Hancock women, her face more dead than alive, crouched over a child who wasn’t moving. Another woman was talking to her, trying to get her to let go of the child. She stood up with an abrupt, jerking motion and reloaded her pistol. Then administered head-shots to every rat-ganger still twitching on the floor. When she tried to turn the gun on herself, one of the Hancock men wrestled the weapon out of her hands and led her out of the room.

  There wasn’t that much more to see. The first police to arrive were local beat-cops used to patrolling in Port Town. They seemed inclined to help the Hancocks dig trench graves and bury the perpetrators without any further fuss. Then the P-Squads arrived and the situation slid off the edge of a cliff. The officer who stood out in Kafari’s mind, blazing like the neon in far-away Vishnu’s Copper Town shopping arcades, was a cold-eyed brute by the name of Yuri Lokkis. He ordered the arrest of every man, woman, and child on the farm, then spoke to the press while P-Squad vans transported the prisoners — including those critically wounded — off-site, presumably to one of the P-Squad interrogation centers like the main Intelligence Office on Nineveh Base.

  Lokkis, his crisp uniform pristine in the afternoon sunlight, told a host of press cameras, “The so-called Hancock Family is nothing more than a militant and subversive cult masquerading as a legitimate organization. This cult preaches selective hatred, teaches helpless, innocent children that violence is a viable solution to disagreements, preaches opposition to the just and fair distribution of critical food supplies, and has just demonstrated utter contempt for human life.

  “Fifteen promising young boys, trying to pull themselves out of grinding poverty, were conducting a legitimate social protest, trying to bring attention to the deplorable conditions rampant in the spaceport’s environs, trying valiantly to point out the cruelty the agrarian interests have displayed by building lush farms with plenty of food literally within sight of starving children. Those promising young boys were murdered, executed in cold blood. Why? For daring to express their civic outrage at the injustice of flaunting wealth and plenty in front of those who have been hardest hit by the economic injustices endured by our citizens!

  “I will never forget the brutal loss of these boys. I will not rest until the perpetrators of this ghastly crime have been tried and convicted for their brutality. Good citizens everywhere need to remember one thing: these agrarian terrorists are cult fanatics at heart. They are agri-CULT-urists. And they will not rest until they have destroyed our urban heritage and our precious right to live as civilized beings.”

  She had to switch it off. Kafari was shaking so hard, she could barely control her fingers. This was wrong, it was monstrously wrong. Surely people would realize POPPA had gone too far, this time? The Hancock family had been attacked without mercy, abandoned by the police, left with no resources but their own. They had rescued elderly women and babies under the age of two from hardened criminals. Surely even the Subbies, who expected someone else to feed them and pay for their every whim, would understand that?

  She got her first glimpse of how unlikely that was, when she got home to find Yalena glued to the datascreen, watching the news coverage instead of doing her homework. Kafari stood in the doorway of their Madison apartment for long minutes, watching her daughter’s face. Yalena was clearly avid for the so-called “facts” the mainstream press was handing out. Watching the child she and Simon had made together, a child POPPA had enslaved like so much chattel, Kafari didn’t know how much longer she could bear to remain here.

  Yalena looked more and more like a lost cause. At fifteen, there wasn’t a single bone in the girl’s body that didn’t belong utterly and irrevocably to Vittori Santorini. She wore her hair the way Nassiona Santorini did. Wore the kind of clothes Isanah Renke had made so wildly popular. Wallpapered her bedroom with pages of the POPPA Manifesto. Listened to POPPA musicians and watched every film that had ever been made by Mirabelle Caresse and Lev Bellamy, the hottest movie stars in Jefferson’s history, who made more in one film than most Subbies would see in a lifetime.

  Mirabelle, a long-legged, wafer-thin beauty with a sultry voice, graced the talk-show circuit with such profound pronouncements as “anyone who thinks it’s all right to pick up a weapon clearly needs psychiatric adjustment” and “eating is not only a social faux pas, it’s the grossest insult possible to the poor and disadvantaged of this world.” Most of the poor, of course, weighed two or three times what the actress did, since eating was their second favorite pastime, right after making little carbon copies of themselves. Leverett Bellamy was her favorite leading man, who’d made his reputation and fortune portraying tough urban war heroes, fighting the Deng street to street in Madison, in films that bore no resemblance to the actual war or the people who’d fought it.

  Kafari closed the apartment door and locked it, then walked quietly into the kitchen and started their dinner. Yalena could not be cajoled, coerced, or persuaded into doing anything so menial and disempowering as performing manual labor like cooking or washing dirty dishes. She was too busy raising her consciousness and communing with her friends over the “in” cause of the week. Her fingernails were perfect, her ability to quote the Manifesto flawless, and her brain resembled a well-used sieve, totally devoid of content.

  The day Yalena turned eighteen — relieving Kafari of any further moral obligation to provide housing, food, and clothing — she was putting herself onto the next freighter to Vishnu, even if she had to smuggle herself aboard as cargo. It galled, to admit such utter defeat, but she had tried everything. She and her family had wracked their brains, thinking up things to do, and none of it had made the slightest dent in the girl’s misguided, ill-considered, unholy convictions. I’m sorry Simon, she found herself saying over and over as she pulled bags and boxes out of the freezer, very nearly blinded by the saltwater pouring down her face, I’m sorry, hon, I’ve lost her and I don’t think anything will ever shock her enough to get her back…

  When Yalena bounced into the kitchen for a glass of soda, she looked at Kafari and said, “Sheesh, Mom, why don’t you peel the onions under cold water, or something?”

  Kafari bit down on it. Held the rage in her teeth. Gripped the frying pan and spatula in her hands
so hard, the bones creaked and the spatula’s handle bent. When the danger was mostly past, she turned and hissed, “Dish it up, yourself, when the timer goes off. I’m not hungry enough to eat in the same room with you.”

  Yalena actually recoiled a step, meeting her gaze with wide and stunned eyes. Kafari stalked past, peripherally aware that her daughter scuttled sideways, out of her way. Kafari slammed her bedroom door shut and twisted the lock, then threw herself onto her cold and empty bed and wept from the bottom of her aching, broken heart. When the worst of the long-suppressed storm had passed, she heard a tiny tapping on her door.

  “Mom?”

  “Go away!”

  The tapping stopped. A few minutes later, it returned. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  “No!”

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  Kafari tightened her fingers through the bedding to stop herself from flinging the door wide and throwing Yalena out of the apartment by the seat of her fashionable pants. She finally mastered the blind rage sufficiently to open the door. Yalena hovered outside.

  “Do you need a doctor?” Yalena asked again, voice faltering under the stare Kafari leveled at her.

  “What I need is a daughter with a brain. Unless you can provide me with one, I strongly suggest you take yourself out of my way for the next few days. Is that simple enough for even you to understand? Or do I have to spell it out in barracks-room language?”

  “But — what did I do? All I said was to cut the onions under running water.”

  Yalena didn’t know. She honest-to-God didn’t know. Kafari was in far too dangerous an emotional state to enlighten her. “The less I say right now, the safer both of us will be. I would suggest that you do your homework. You might start by trying to discover what really happened today at the Hancock Family’s barracks.”

  “This is about Grangers? A bunch of crazy deviants who massacred fifteen innocent boys just because they were staging a protest? Those boys were my age! Not even in high school, yet. My God, Mom, I know you’re a Granger, but how could you possibly defend that pack of murdering farmers?”