The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  She managed to limp through the lesson, mostly because it was interrupted partway through by the arrival of Vishnu’s peacekeeping officers and several ambulances. She watched with the others as those ambulances pulled away, lights strobing as they headed to the nearest hospital. Yalena fully expected to be summoned by the officers, who were speaking with other students and teachers, but no one called her over or even glanced her way.

  Invisibility had its uses.

  She waited all night, in fact, for the questions to come but no one came to the apartment and no one called her father, either. Yalena watched the local newscast, which gave her a clue as to the unexpected lack of legal attention directed her way.

  “A hate-motivated crime was broken up this afternoon at Shasti High School when a Jeffersonian Granger refugee was attacked by a gang of students whose parents hold positions of authority in Jefferson’s POPPA Party. The attack, which was broken up by Granger students who came to the victim’s rescue, has prompted Vishnu’s Minister of Residency to revoke the educational visas of the young men charged with the assault. No formal charges have been levied, at the request of the student and her family, but the students named in the case will be deported as soon as they are released from the hospital.

  “The Jeffersonian ambassador has protested this decision, charging the Minister with bigotry and cultural bias. The Minister has issued a formal statement warning that visa applications for family members of Jeffersonian officials connected to POPPA will come under sharper scrutiny, given the rise in tensions and the increasing number of violent incidents between Granger refugees and POPPA Party affiliates on Vishnu. The entire Chamber of Ministers has made it clear that Jefferson’s internal wrangles will not be tolerated on Vishnu’s soil.”

  That was the whole report. Yalena sat wrapped in thoughtful silence as her father said, “It’s about time Vishnu did something about this mess. I’m surprised worse violence hasn’t broken out before now. I hope the kid they attacked will be all right. And I hope to hell there aren’t reprisals against Grangers still trapped on Jefferson.”

  Yalena swallowed hard. She hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t stopped to consider the long-term effects of her enraged actions, this afternoon. It had felt right, at the time. Still felt right. But she hadn’t thought it through and people would suffer for it, as a result. She hadn’t had much time in which to decide, given the danger Dena was in, which helped assuage her tremors of guilt. It also gave Yalena a new and visceral appreciation of what her father had been talking about, when he’d tried to explain the purpose of C.O.R.P. to her. She had made the best decision she could, under the circumstances. And now she — and others — had to live with her decision and the actions flowing from it.

  Command, she discovered in that moment, was a bitch with spurs.

  The next day at school, she was aware of a sharp and silent scrutiny. Not from the POPPA brats, but from the Grangers. All of them seemed to know. It was eerie, to be stared at everywhere she went, by people who had literally ignored her for two and a half years. At lunch, she found herself staring back into Granger eyes, driven by pride and smouldering anger into holding gazes until the others’ glances dropped away, puzzled and discomfited no small amount.

  By the time school was over for the day, Yalena was ready to disappear into whatever sanctuary she could find, but was duty bound to return to the C.O.R.P. practice field. She did nearly as badly as she’d done the day before and ended up on the ground time and again, sprawled in a winded heap where her instructor and fellow students had sent her flailing through the air. She wouldn’t have to worry about proving her worthiness for combat, because she was going to flunk out of basic training.

  By the time the session was over, Yalena was ready to do something else violent, just to burn off the frustration. When she emerged from the locker room, having showered and changed into street clothes, Yalena checked abruptly. Fifteen Granger students had formed a barricade across the hall and the stairwell. She considered taking to her heels in a repeat of yesterday’s escape through the men’s locker room. For long, fraught moments, she looked at them and they looked at her. Then one of the boys, a tall, rough-looking kid named Jiri Mokombo, whom Yalena had seen around school, but hadn’t shared classes with, breached the silence.

  “How come you did it?” he demanded. “You’re one of them.”

  Yalena didn’t have to ask who “them” was. “That’s my business,” she said in a flat voice, angry and scared and determined not to show it. She didn’t want another fight. And she didn’t have anything in her hands, this time, except air. And courage. Which wasn’t a whole lot when outnumbered fifteen to one.

  “Your business, huh?” Melissa Hardy, who was in one of Yalena’s classes, pushed her way through the others to meet Yalena’s gaze. “You’re wrong. You made it our business. Why?”

  Yalena took her measure, silently, trying to gauge not the physical dimensions of an opponent, but the psychological dimensions of the exchange. The emotion that burned in Melissa’s eyes was more puzzlement than anger. Yalena shook her head. “No, you’re wrong, Melissa. I didn’t make it your business. I made it mine. Frankly, I didn’t much like the odds. Or the assholes involved.”

  Someone at the back of the group muttered, “You know, she’s never made up to any of ’em. Not once. I noticed. And none of them have ever tried to make friends with her, either.”

  “Of course they didn’t, not when her father’s the butcher of Etaine,” Jiri snarled. “They wouldn’t touch her with a fifty-meter pole. And neither would I.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to,” Yalena said coldly.

  Melissa turned abruptly and glared at her own friends. “Say what you like, she stopped a rape and God knows what else, before they’d had a chance to do more than rip Dena’s clothes off. And there’s not one of us — not one — who hasn’t wanted to break a few of those bastards’ bones, ourselves. Only we didn’t quite dare, did we? We talk big, but when push came to shove, it wasn’t any of us who stopped it. It was her, by herself, against a whole rotten gang of them. Yalena Khrustinova doesn’t deserve nasty accusations or name-calling from any of us. The only thing I want to know,” she swung around toward Yalena again, “is why.”

  Yalena realized that this was one of those moments that forever changed your life, if you were smart enough to recognize it and strong enough to act on it. The first such moment in Yalena’s life came back to haunt her, now, with memory of a ghastly silence that had followed in the wake of screams she still heard in nightmares.

  “The last night I spent on Jefferson,” she said in a hoarse voice that sounded nothing like her own, “I got caught in a Granger protest march in Madison. My two best friends in the world were with me. When the P-Squads arrested the Hancock family and lied about it, Ami-Lynn and Charmaine and I went to the protest march. President Zeloc—” she spat the name out like every syllable was pure poison ” — ordered the Bolo to run over an unarmed crowd in the street. I was in that street. So were my friends. My mother…” Her voice shattered.

  The other girl’s eyes flinched. They all knew that Kafari Khrustinova was dead. That she’d been murdered by the P-Squads. But they didn’t know the rest.

  “My mother pulled me to safety. Just ahead of its treads. My friends were behind me. They didn’t make it. Have you ever seen what’s left when a thirteen-thousand-ton machine runs over a person? There must’ve been six or seven hundred people, just in the city block I was on, that were crushed to death. And you know what was left? Paste. Red, sticky paste, like pureed tomatoes, with smears of hair and shoe leather…”

  Somebody whimpered. Yalena didn’t care. About any of them.

  “Mom and I crawled away through the sewers. All night, in the sewers, wading through shit and blood, while the lynch mobs pulled people off the PSF farms and chopped them up and hung the pieces on light poles and street signs and burned half the downtown. We finally reached the spaceport and she smuggled me out. And th
en a trigger-happy P-Squaddie killed her. You know what the hardest thing was, yesterday, when I pulled those bastards off Dena? Not breaking their necks, along with their stinking arms and legs. And now, if you don’t mind, kindly leave me the hell alone!”

  She stalked forward.

  They parted like reeds before a hurricane.

  She actually made it all the way through the gymnasium and halfway across the track before they caught up. One of them, anyway. Melissa Hardy called her name, running to catch up.

  “Wait! Yalena, wait!”

  She stopped, not even sure why. Melissa closed the gap, breathing hard. Yalena didn’t say anything. Puzzled grey eyes studied her for a long moment.

  “I’ve always wondered,” she said slowly, “why you left Jefferson. Why you worked so hard, studying. Why you signed up for C.O.R.P. classes and extreme camping and martial arts. It didn’t fit the pattern POPPA brats follow. I didn’t realize…” She blinked hard for a moment. “I’m sorry about your mother, Yalena. And your friends.” Before Yalena could say anything scathing, she added, “My brother was killed in that street, too.”

  Their eyes met and held. Yalena felt a dangerous crack in her emotional armor.

  She swallowed hard. Then whispered, “I’m sorry. For a lot of things.”

  The other girl said, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you must feel. It’s got to be awful.”

  Yalena shook her head. “No. It’s worse. I’m going back. To kill them. All of them.”

  The other girl’s breath caught. Then something shifted in her eyes, something Yalena couldn’t name, which left chills slithering along her nerves. When she spoke, there was steel in her voice. “I’m going with you.”

  She took the other girl’s measure. Made her decision. “Sounds fair to me. There’ll be fewer targets to hit, with two of us.”

  It was more than a pact, more than a holy alliance.

  It was a promise. A threat.

  And POPPA’s death.

  They shook on it.

  II

  Kafari had lost a lot of weight, but she wasn’t the only person on Jefferson who was thinner, these days. Four years of guerilla warfare had left her lean and hard as a jaglitch. She’d occasionally eaten jaglitch, which could be digested — sort of — with the proper enzymes to break the alien proteins down into something a human stomach considered food. Their store of supplies contained plenty of enzymes, pilfered from pharmaceutical warehouses and fish-processing plants.

  Dinny Ghamal stepped into the cavern Kafari called headquarters this week. He was whipcord tough, his face scarred and chiseled by torture and grief, but his eyes were still human. Emmeline had survived. She’d given birth to their first child, a son, six months after their rescue from Nineveh Base. It was a hell of a time and place to begin a family, but it had given many of Kafari’s troops heart, reminding them that life could hold onto its sweetness and wonder, even in the midst of desperate struggle and hardship. The boy was the unofficial mascot of the entire rebellion. Dinny’s wife, unable to travel fast or far while nursing an infant, had become a crackerjack code breaker, hacking into sophisticated systems that Kafari had taught her how to open. Dinny’s wife served the rebellion well. So did Dinny. He bent low to duck under the rocky entrance to her “office.”

  “Commodore,” he nodded, indicating with a single word that someone besides her own most trusted staff officers was somewhere in the camp, “the new supply teams are underway. It’s a good haul, sir. We hit three food-distribution centers and wrecked what we couldn’t transport. There’ll be a passel of hungry Subbies, tomorrow. They’ll really be furious by the end of the week. POPPA will have to tighten the rations again.”

  His smile was predatory, sharp, full of fangs.

  So was hers. “Good.”

  “I have other reports in from the field, sir,” Dinny added. “And pouches from several couriers.”

  “Let’s hear the reports, please.”

  “Team Gamma Five reports success without casualties.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Kafari whispered, closing her eyes against the sudden sting of tears. A penetration team had gone to Lakoska Holding Facility with orders to disrupt the wholesale deportation of convicted dissidents to the Hanatos “work camp.” Their target had been Lakoska’s barracks, housing more than five hundred dissidents and protestors. Most of them were Grangers, but a surprising number were urbanites desperate for food and medical care and willing to steal to get them. A few were just ordinary looters. Kafari’s team of computer hackers had cracked the security codes on Lakoska’s transportation schedule. They’d found the date and time of the highly classified transfer that would’ve sent the newly convicted prisoners to Hanatos tomorrow morning.

  Team Gamma Five had, perforce, struck tonight.

  Kafari had tried to rescue the prisoners already in Hanatos camp. Tried hard, just six days ago. Her entire team had died in the attempt. Their lives had bought the freedom of just five prisoners, who managed to escape during the wild confusion. Of those five, only one had made it out of the wilderness. Hanatos had been constructed, with great care and ruthless foresight, smack in the middle of prime jaglitch habitat. Once the remaining guards had killed Kafari’s team — none of her people had allowed themselves to be taken alive — the retaliatory executions had commenced. The P-Squads had slaughtered fifty prisoners and made two hundred new arrests for every guard her team had killed in the attempt.

  Kafari had spent a nasty half hour bent over a basin, losing every scrap of the meal she’d just eaten when the news arrived. Dinny had held her head while she heaved and wept uncontrollably, had wiped her face with a cold, wet cloth while she leaned against him, trembling with the emotional reaction, then sat down with her afterward, focusing her attention on what they could do: plan their own retaliation. Tonight’s strike at the less well-defended Lakoska Holding Facility, had freed the latest batch of victims before they could be transported to Hanatos.

  “How many did we get out, tonight?” she asked.

  “Five hundred seventeen. We split ’em up as ordered and scattered them as best we could. I’m told it went smoothly. The transport buses were already in the parking lot, conveniently assembled for the next morning. We’ve set up shelters in several abandoned mine shafts, carefully distributed throughout the Damisi network. We managed to keep families together, at least.”

  “Good.” Kafari had ordered old mine shafts to be converted into emergency shelters. She’d also instructed people in Granger country to dig bomb shelters under their houses and barns, with air filtration systems capable of handling biochemical attacks. She would never forget the riot she’d been caught in, with the gas that had very nearly caught her — gas that Simon had been convinced came from POPPA, itself, in a staged attack on its own people. Vittori Santorini had plenty of money to buy ingredients to make whatever nasty biochemicals he wanted to disperse. Since farm folk didn’t have publicly funded underground shelters, Kafari had strongly suggested they provide shelters, themselves. The residents of Klameth Canyon, Cimmero Canyon, and hundreds of other canyons scattered throughout Granger country had dug into the topsoil and bedrock with a vengeance.

  But Kafari couldn’t ask the farmers and ranchers to hide five hundred seventeen escaped convicts. POPPA would be hunting for any trace of those people and Grangers would be under extra surveillance — electronic and personal — as prime suspects for sheltering them. Kafari couldn’t risk innocent lives, and her own resources were stretched to the limit. She’d known that when she’d given the order to hit the camp.

  “The Ranee came in yesterday from Mali,” she said, glancing at Dinny. “You’ve talked to our friend, Girishanda. I want to send our five hundred seventeen friends out on the Ranee when she breaks orbit.”

  “He won’t want to run the risk.”

  “Oh, really?” she asked softly, hearing the dangerous tone in her own voice. “If he wants our money for his merchandise, he will by God take them out. As man
y as we can jam into his cargo holds.”

  “I took the precaution,” Dinny said with a grim smile, “of having a few people brought out here, tonight. To participate, unofficially, in our negotiations. I brought in some of the people we airlifted out of Lakoska. I also brought in Attia.”

  Kafari hissed. “Yes-s-s-s. Oh, yes. A fine idea, Dinny. That may just do the trick.” Attia ben Ruben was the sole survivor from Hanatos death camp. “Very good. Our rescue team did a fine night’s work. Be sure the team members know I said that.”

  Dinny nodded, then gave her a large pouch, just delivered via special courier. Kafari shuffled through the material and whistled softly. “My friend,” she said, “this is some kind of good haul.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “It is.”

  It held documents recovered from the home of a P-Squad regional director, who had been involved in all sorts of nastiness. Letters, official reports, directives from planetary HQ spelling out measures to be implemented, along with a timetable, drew another soft reaction from her. “We need to get this off-world,” she said in a hushed tone. “There are people on Vishnu who need to see these.” If they could just persuade Vishnu’s government to help them…

  “That can be managed. Even if Girishanda won’t take our refugees from Lakoska, we still have someone ready to ship out. They can deliver them. I’ve already made our copies.”

  “Very good. Handle it, please. Is there anything else?”

  “Other than shifting headquarters and interviewing our visitor? No, sir. It’s time to move out. The first transports are ready to go. The moons are down and the sentinels are in place. Our friend is here, waiting in the truck, as ordered.”