The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  Attia sat down, watching silently as Dinny removed Mr. Girishanda’s blindfold.

  He blinked a couple of times, then his gaze came to rest on the slender girl opposite him. He sat up so abruptly, the manacles bit into both wrists. He spoke, jaggedly, something she didn’t understand. Kafari didn’t speak Hindi. She didn’t have to. The naked shock in his face was all too eloquent a translation.

  “My name’s Attia,” the girl said in a rough, ruined voice. “I turned fourteen three months ago. In Hanatos Camp.”

  Girishanda was trying to swallow. The sound was ghastly in the frozen silence. Red Wolf, an unobtrusive presence behind Girishanda’s shoulder, had taken out a belt knife and was jabbing the point into the arm of the chair he sat in, mechanically, with fixed concentration.

  “Have you ever heard of Hanatos Camp?” Attia asked in a harsh voice.

  The gunrunner shook his head. He was still trying to swallow. Kafari gave him credit for guts. His gaze stayed on Attia’s face. What was left of Attia’s face.

  “Ever hear of Professor Mahault?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “She wrote a book. The True History of Glorious Jefferson.”

  Girishanda was frowning. “What does a professor have to do with…?”

  “She rewrote our history,” Attia said harshly. “Wrote a book full of lies to prove that Grangers had altered the history of our world. Her book gave POPPA the ‘proof’ they needed to classify Grangers as a subversive sub-culture. One that existed to destroy true civilaztion.”

  “That’s insane!” Girishandra gasped.

  “You’re damned right, it’s insane,” Red Wolf growled.

  Girishanda’s eyes tracked towards Attia, who spoke again in that ruined, harsh voice. “Yes, it is. But there was no one to stop them. Not even the Commodore could stop Jefferson’s House of Law and Senate when they passed legislation outlawing Grangerism. Our whole culture, itself, is now a crime. Against humanity, decency, and planetary security. Anyone caught practicing Grangerism is arrested, convicted, and shipped out to the nearest ‘work camp.’ Once there, we become slave labor. We de-terraform ‘raped areas’ to allow nature to reclaim its own. Or we’re sent into mine shafts to work ’round the clock shifts. It’s too expensive to pay miners actual wages, when convicts can be forced to do the work. All that costs is money to buy the guards, ammunition, and just enough food to keep the slaves on their feet and working. And sometimes,” she added harshly, “not even that.”

  Girishanda’s eyes flicked across Attia, whose skeletal pallor had not faded in the mere two days she had been free and would not fade for months to come. If she didn’t get killed fighting to free others. There were still prisoners in far too many work camps.

  Mr. Girishanda met her gaze, once more. He didn’t speak for long moments. Then he asked very quietly, indeed, “Would you tell me, please, what happened to you? I’m trying to understand.”

  Attia’s copper-fire eyes searched his face for long moments. “You’re from off-world. Vishnu?”

  “Yes. I am from Vishnu.”

  “Are you selling us guns?”

  “I am trying to,” he said gently, flicking a glance at the partition between himself and “Commodore Oroton.” “It seems that the sale is contingent on hearing what you have to say.”

  She scowled, which pulled the scar tissue in hideous directions. “All right. Then listen up good, ’cause I don’t want to relive this out loud, ever again.”

  Kafari knew exactly what was coming.

  Mr. Girishanda only thought he did.

  III

  Phil is an hour late returning from lunch when he finally enters my makeshift maintenance depot, a sheet-metal barn topped by a metal canopy that barely accommodates my bulk. The entire, flimsy affair threatens to become airborne each time a storm sweeps in from the ocean west of Madison. Phil is, as usual, swearing.

  “You won’t believe what happened last night! Those goddamned freedom fighters hit the food distribution centers! Three of ’em! My sister Maria found out this morning, when she went down to collect the week’s groceries from the warehouse. I hadda take her to see a guy I know, who wouldn’t sell direct to her even if she told him I sent her. It took my whole damn paycheck to get anything for the kids t’ eat, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot he had left, neither. Not at any price.”

  “I am sorry to hear that, Phil.” I find it interesting to note that Phil no longer calls the Granger rebels by the term “terrorists.” This is the only descriptor used by the POPPA leadership when referring to rebels who routinely shoot corrupt POPPA officials in their driveways, ambush police patrols, and execute outspoken broadcast propagandists in their houses — admittedly clean executions that never touch a family member or innocent bystanders. “Terrorists” is not, however, the word drifting through the streets, where food riots have been crushed just as brutally as Granger protests were during the early stages of POPPA’s rise to power.

  “And that’s not the half of it,” Phil continues to rage, with his nano-tatt blazing in a blood-red swath across half his face, pulsing in time to his elevated heartbeat. I find the rhythm distracting. “You know what the shit-for-brains Minister of Urban Distributions did about it? Did he tell the P-Squads what he oughta be telling them? Which is what I’d tell ’em, if I was in his shoes. ‘Find those bastards or go hungry!’ Did he say that? Oh, no, not him. He just went and cut the rations again, that’s what! Another unholy, unbearable twenty percent! How’n hell are kids s’posed to grow without nothin’ to eat? I ask you, do those POPPA bigshots look like they’re goin’ without dinner? Hell, no. There ain’t no such thing as a skinny cop, let alone a skinny politician.”

  Phil wipes sweat from his nano-tatt with a hand that is actually unsteady.

  “I dunno what my family’s gonna do, Big Guy. If Maria loses any more weight, she’s gonna collapse. She’s nothin’ but skin and bones, now. And Tony, that no-account oldest boy of hers, that goddamned little idiot got himself hooked on snow-white and lost the only job our whole family had, except mine. D’you know what’s it like, Big Guy, t’be the only person in a whole damn family that anybody respects? Five sisters, I got, all married,” he adds with justifiable pride, given the informal methods of procreation practiced by many subsidy recipients, who are desperate for any increase in the baseline payments, “an’ all five of ’em has kids, twenty-three kids, all together. And the little ones look up t’ me. They say ‘I’m gonna be like Uncle Phil when I grow up. I’m gonna have a job!’ I ain’t smart, Big Guy. I got nothin’ much t’ be proud of, I know that, and God knows I ain’t the sort a kid oughta be lookin’ up to, to decide what t’ do with his life.”

  His eyes film with suspicious moisture and his voice assumes a bleak, nearly despairing tone I have never heard from him. “And what chance have they got, anyhow, to be like Uncle Phil? To have a job, I mean, and somebody’s respect? There’s no jobs now. The trash they’re learning in school sure isn’t gonna teach ’em how to get one. It’s worse now than it was when I was in school, and man, they didn’t teach me nothin’. If things don’t change pretty soon,” he adds, “they won’t need to worry about growin’ up like anybody, ’cause there’s no damn food t’feed em, anyway.” His voice turns savage. “Sar Gremian needs me, don’t he? T’keep you running? So I eat, while them kids starve. It ain’t right, Big Guy, it just ain’t right. We never signed up for this kind’a stuff, when folks voted POPPA in, all those years back.” He pauses, then adds in a puzzled voice. “How’d it get t’be so bad in such a short time, huh? Seems longer, t’me, but it’s just nineteen years since POPPA took over. Spent my whole schooling, just about, in POPPA classrooms, and not one a’ them teachers ever told us it could get like this so fast.”

  Phil’s revelations, coming as fast and thick as Y-Band bolts from a Deng Yavac, astonish me. He is more deeply disaffected with POPPA than I had realized. He has also gained far more self-respect and technical skill than I would have beli
eved possible. While his nano-tatt is as colorful as ever and he still shows a predilection for barracks-room language as colorful as his face, he no longer speaks like the illiterate grease monkey he was just four years ago. He has, in fact, become a surprisingly skilled technician.

  Granted, he has spent most of the past four years studying the archived manuals and technical schematics pertaining to my weapons systems and other hardware, which required even longer sessions working with a dictionary and the science, mathematics, and engineering texts embedded in my reference banks. I have been forced to grant him access to these, as the Minister for Public Education made a thorough sweep through Jefferson’s public educational system, e-libraries, and datasite archives. It is no longer possible to obtain a real education on Jefferson without attending one of the private schools operated for the children of POPPA officials, whose databases and on-line libraries are not accessible to the average citizen.

  This fact angered Phil immensely when he discovered the existence of this two-tier educational system, with its built-in mechanism for exclusion of the unequal masses. He might never have discovered this, if not for my urgent need for repairs. I have sustained enough cumulative damage from rebel forces to make constant repair work a necessity. Each time I leave my makeshift maintenance depot to disperse rioters, repel attacks on police stations and military compounds, or pursue guerilla-style raiding parties, I am subjected to direct fire from a surprisingly large arsenal of military-grade small arms.

  Nor am I the only thing taking cumulative damage. The guerillas are taking a heavy toll on food distribution networks — trucking centers, packing plants, warehouses — and utilities infrastructure — electrical power generating plants, sewage treatment facilities, public transportation hubs — that cannot be replaced at Jefferson’s current level of industrial sluggishness. There are no manufacturing plants left to replace the equipment and buildings being wrecked. The repeated attacks have driven many engineers and technicians to boycott work in a massive protest movement that is crippling Jefferson’s cities as effectively as the damage to the infrastructure, itself.

  Commodore Oroton is fiendishly effective at his job.

  So are his field troops. Rebel marksmen have an uncanny ability to put bullets through external camera lenses and sensor arrays, which is not just annoying, it is downright alarming. Scrounge as he will, Phil cannot keep finding replacement parts indefinitely. Worse, during my transits to and from those conflicts, usually through heavily populated areas, I am also hit by suicide-teams masquerading as ordinary civilians. The bombers get close enough to hurl man-portable octocellulose bombs against my tertiary gun systems and track linkages, inflicting a steady barrage of damage that cannot be repaired fast enough. Not in the face of near-total lack of replacement parts.

  I am also burning up antipersonnel ammunition that can only be replaced by diverting it from P-Squad depots, an activity that tries Phil’s nerves to their utmost. If Phil Fabrizio is afraid of anything, it is the P-Squads. What is particularly irritating about the expenditure of munitions is the knowledge that I am wasting it on rank-and-file fighters, as I am unable to locate, let alone eliminate, the ringleaders. For all their vaunted prowess, the P-Squads have had no better luck cracking open the rebel network. I do not know if that is because the P-Squads are inadequate to the task or because Commodore Oroton has built a particularly effective guerilla network, with cells difficult to crack open. The rebel tendency to suicide, rather than be taken for questioning, certainly makes it difficult to question those who might otherwise have provided valuable information.

  The mysterious Commodore Oroton is an extremely effective commander, with what is clearly a great deal of military experience. I surmise, based on the actions of his hit-squads and the thought-processes behind them, that the commodore has worked with Bolos in the past. If not as an officer, perhaps as a technician or a cadet who failed the rigorous examinations necessary for command. Whoever Oroton is, the situation is rapidly deteriorating into a serious crisis.

  Phil mutters, “I’m sorry I’m late. Lemme climb up and look at that infinite repeater processor that got hit last time. I gotta know what parts t’steal.”

  Phil climbs up the rear port-side ladders and clambers cautiously across my stern, reaching the infinite repeater housing that routes fire-control signals to my port-side and stern infinite repeaters. The guidance-control circuitry is, of course, inside my warhull, but there are semi-external processors that route the signals. These processors are covered with flintsteel housings across my flanks and back. It is a design flaw in the Mark XX series, which was corrected in the Mark XXI and later Bolos. Phil cuts and pries at the warped housing with power tools, sweating and swearing until it finally comes loose. He peers critically at the damage and just shakes his head.

  “Big Guy, the tracking control for these rear-port infinite repeaters is out. O-W-T out. There’s a hole right through the actual quantum processors and quantum is French for ‘Don’t fuck with it.’ Ain’t no way I’m gonna fix this one.” He gestures at the damage, evincing extreme disgust. “Maybe I can able to cobble something up t’replace it. I stole a workstation processor last week from the Admin building on campus, but it won’t work real well. If Sar Gremian doesn’t get us some honest-to-God spares soon, I honest-to-shit don’t know what we’re gonna do. Next time you go out, try to duck the bullets, huh?”

  “I am too big to duck, Phil.”

  “You said a pissin’ mouthful.” He wipes sweat off his face with one sleeve. “They’re screwin’ you up royal, that’s for sure. We’d be a blamed sight better if they bought spare parts as rewards, ’stead of sticking so many goddamn made-for-prime-time, gaudy-assed medals up on your prow. Much more a’them shiny things and I won’t be able to open the housings on your forward processors.”

  I am inclined to agree with Phil’s assessment of the relative worth of the “medals” I have been awarded by this administration. I, too, would prefer their removal.

  Phil is climbing down when I receive an urgent call from Sar Gremian. “We’ve got a police patrol pinned by rebel gunfire. I’m sending the coordinates now.”

  Those coordinates show a spot thirty-seven kilometers north of the Klameth Canyon agricultural complex. This is cattle country, with extensive herds of beef cattle, dairy farms, vast hog lots, and poultry houses that stretch for a hundred meters or more and routinely house seven or eight million birds. Most of this was privately held, before the land-snatch programs confiscated and collectivized it. The terrain is comparable to Klameth Canyon, which sets up a trickle of unease through my threat-assessment processors.

  “Phil,” I say urgently, “climb down faster. I’ve just been ordered into another skirmish. A police patrol has been trapped in Cimmero Canyon and is taking heavy fire.”

  Phil just shakes his head in disgust and shimmies his way down ladders until he reaches the floor. “Watch your back, willya?” he says while getting out of my way. “You got enough stuff back there to fix, without adding anything new to the list.”

  “I will do my best, Phil. Given the state of my treads, this will take a great deal of time.”

  I head out at the best road speed of which I am currently capable, which is pitifully slow compared to my optimal speed. I have sustained sufficient track damage, I cannot risk my treads to the wear-and-tear they would sustain under greater velocity. At sixteen point two-five kilometers per hour, the journey will take me two and a half hours to complete. Local police attempting to reach their brethren have come under such withering fire, losing three aircars and seven groundcars full of officers, they had retreated and refused a second rescue attempt. Federal troops — consisting of P-Squadron officers — have also refused to risk themselves against an entrenched enemy with effective snipers.

  Given Jefferson’s wholesale destruction of mothballed military aircraft during Gifre Zeloc’s presidency in a “political statement” that involved bulldozers and a crowd of thousands screaming their a
pproval, I am literally the only resource POPPA can fall back on, to neutralize what appears to be a relatively small handful of riflemen. By monitoring police channels, I ascertain that the rebels don’t seem to be trying to overrun the patrol, just pin it down. As this does not fit with previous patterns, I exercise caution during my final approach.

  There are only three routes I can take to where the patrol is pinned. All three lead through relatively narrow areas. To reach any of them, I must pass the city of Menassa, which grew up in the Adero floodplain at the point where the main entrance to this canyon opens out. It is a fair-sized city with a population of roughly two hundred seventeen thousand people, founded to support the meat-packing and processing industries necessary to turn Cimmero Canyon’s herds into cuts of meat ready for shipment. I select the entrance south of Menassa, to avoid bringing the fight directly into the midst of a major civilian center. The city is considerably longer than it is deep, stretching for nearly ten kilometers along the main roads leading to Madison in the south and mining communities to the north.

  This portion of the Damisi mountain range is heavily forested. The canyon walls slice through a thick deciduous forest where shifting climate patterns and plate tectonics have brought abundant rainfall to a region formerly dry enough to erode away as badlands. The result is a dense tangle of native vegetation that forms a green fringe along the crown of the cliffs. The ranchers of Cimmero Canyon do constant battle with inimical wildlife drawn to their herds. Cimmero’s residents were among the strongest protestors of the weapons-confiscation legislation, for reasons of personal safety as well as predator control to protect their food animals. Indeed, the Hancock family co-op was based in this region.