The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  “Fortunately for us, Captain Brisbane, Vishnu’s Bolo commander, has one, since she’s responsible for defending both Vishnu and Mali and needs to move between the planets. She also has wide discretionary power to make decisions in the Ngara system’s best interests. Right now, those interests include deposing POPPA. It’s a little convoluted, but Vishnu’s Ministry of Defense asked our friends from Shiva Weapons Labs,” Estevao nodded toward the engineers on loan, “to recommend using a heavy lift sled to turn Sonny over. Toward that end, Captain Brisbane has loaned us her sled.”

  A stir ran through the room. The students weren’t the only ones surprised by that news. Even the veterans looked startled, which gave Yalena a clue as to how unusual Captain Brisbane’s decision was. She was taking a gamble, counting on the quiet war front in this sector to risk allowing that sled to leave the Ngara system. Captain Brisbane obviously took their mission very seriously, indeed.

  Estevao waited for the flicker of reaction to die down, then went on. “Thanks to that loan, we’ll be able to bypass Ziva Two — and the inspectors — entirely. Colonel Khrustinov intends to drop every bit of our equipment and supplies with the sled, in one trip.”

  Melissa, seated beside Yalena, lifted a hand to gain Estevao’s attention.

  “Yes?”

  “Isn’t that going to make it harder to disperse our people and supplies? If we put everything on the load going to the Bolo’s depot, how will we smuggle anybody out to the base camps?”

  “We’ll orbit the sled a couple of times to make sure it’s functioning properly and make our initial descent over the opposite hemisphere. According to Colonel Khrustinov, the satellite coverage for the hemisphere opposite Madison is virtually nonexistent, since most of it’s ocean. When they replaced the satellites after the Deng war, they put most of them in geosynchronous orbit above Jefferson’s major cities. That made sense, at the time. They put a few communications satellites into standard orbits, mostly to keep emergency channels open for the fishing fleet. We’ll time it to avoid as many as possible, maybe even all of them. If necessary, we’ll jam them for a few minutes, just long enough to drop a few air buses and let them disperse to various camps. They’ll fly under the radar net, while we draw most of POPPA’s attention, aboard the main sled—”

  He halted. Yalena turned around and found her father standing in the doorway. Her heart skidded painfully toward her toes. He met Yalena’s gaze, then swept his glance across the others who waited in such anxious silence. Moving slowly, stepping with caution between the people sitting on the floor, he returned to the front of the room, thanking Estevao in a quiet voice for taking charge in his absence.

  Then he faced them with the news. “An urban resistence group has exploded a bomb in the most exclusive POPPA residential enclave in Madison. Nassiona Santorini has been killed. So has Isanah Renke. Along with half of Jefferson’s military high command and several critical members of the Senate, House of Law, and High Court.”

  Utter silence held the briefing room. No one shouted for joy, because they all knew what POPPA’s reaction would be. Her father confirmed their dire suspicions with brutal candor. “Vittori has ordered the execution of every prisoner in every POPPA work camp and prison. Three-quarters of a million people…”

  Yalena shut her eyes, as much to hide from the ghastly look on her father’s face as to shut out the pictures filling her imagination: P-Squads firing on helpless people. Her father added, “Commodore Oroton has launched a rescue attempt. I think we all know exactly what that means.”

  Yalena opened her eyes again, took in the dismay on the faces of the combat veterans, saw, as well, the dawning of sudden, brutal understanding in the eyes of students she’d helped organize into a fighting force. That same understanding ignited like cold fire in her own heart. To mount a rescue attempt, Commodore Oroton had to come out of hiding. Fear jolted like icicles along her nerves, robbing her of the air she needed to breathe. There might not be a rebellion left, by the time their freighter reached Jefferson.

  Her father’s voice jerked her attention back. “I would suggest that we revise our plans. We’re only three days from Jefferson, which means federal troops can’t react fast enough to eliminate every Granger community and farmhold, particularly not if they’re kept busy fighting Commodore Oroton’s people for control of the prison camps. The commodore is already organizing Granger civilians into self-defense militias, particularly in the Damisi canyon country. Oroton has already warned Grangers to abandon indefensible farms and take shelter where blockades can be held by relatively few defenders.

  “The rebellion is also funneling weapons into the hands of the militias, including a few heavy artillery guns to hold the mountain passes and canyon entrances until we can arrive to help. It won’t take a lot of firepower or manpower to turn places like Klameth Canyon into fortified strongholds. Frankly, it’ll be much harder for POPPA to take Klameth than it was for the Deng. They can’t mount an air assault, because POPPA doesn’t have a functional air force left. Without Sonny, they don’t have the firepower, either. So…” Her father flicked his glance across the crowd. “Estevao.”

  Her mother’s cousin responded crisply. “Yes, sir?”

  “Our combat veterans have just become the backbone of the civilian defense effort. We’ll allocate part of our equipment and supplies to your mission, arming residents and showing them a few tricks of the trade, defending entrenched positions from aggressors. How much we allocate will depend on events between now and the time we make orbit. I’ll keep you updated as we receive word from Commodore Oroton.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yalena.”

  “Sir?” She jumped half out of her skin, gulping as she met her father’s gaze.

  “Your group has just been promoted from supply delivery to command-liaison and infiltration duty.”

  “Sir?” she blinked, totally confused.

  “You,” he said with a strange glint in his eye, “have more experience operating inside the POPPA propaganda machine than anyone in this combat force.”

  Her cheeks stung with sudden heat, then ran chill again as every person in the room turned to look at her, eyes shuttered.

  “Instruct the other students, please, in how to think inside the POPPA paradigm. Commodore Oroton thinks we can make contact with the urban group that’s taken credit for today’s bombing. We need somebody who can speak their language, who understands the urban mindset and can help us forge an alliance with these folks.”

  Yalena nodded, feeling almost numb. Working with urban guerillas was a far cry from courier work, distributing guns, bullets, and food to Granger camps. The lives of her friends — and potentially many more brave people — lay in her hands, in the job she must do, training the other students to understand how the masses, brain-washed for twenty years by POPPA hogwash, might think as their loyalty turned to hatred and the will to kill. She found herself reaching back through time and memory, trying to recapture the nasty blend of arrogance, greed, selfishness, and stupidity that had been her entire life for fifteen years.

  It was more distasteful than she’d expected. And easier than she would have liked to admit. Thinking for herself and making her own decisions was hard work, nearly as hard as trying to be Simon Khrustinov’s daughter — or Kafari Khrustinova’s. The lure of letting someone else do one’s thinking and make one’s decisions was a siren’s song, fatally attractive, and the entire urban population of Jefferson had spent two decades living under its spell.

  It wouldn’t be easy to teach self-reliant infiltrators how to behave like people who had abdicated responsibility for virtually every decision an ordinary person made a thousand times a day. The size of the job she faced was daunting enough to terrify her. Worse, in its way, than the idea of going into combat. It took a different kind of courage.

  The rest of the voyage rushed past in a blur. Yalena worked twenty-hour days, drilling the students in POPPA’s mindset, belief structure, and behavior. They wer
e appalled by the culture she was preparing them to interact with, but they also worked like fiends, trying to understand and get it right.

  When she wasn’t teaching, she sought out her cousin Estevao and the other combat veterans, listening to their plans, trying to learn how they thought — and why they thought that way. She listened until weariness dragged her eyelids down, then she toppled into her bunk and slept long enough to start again the next day. She didn’t feel nearly ready enough when they shifted out of hyper-space and dropped into Jefferson’s star system, shedding velocity for the cross-system approach to Yalena’s homeworld.

  They gathered in the ship’s mess to watch their progress across Jefferson’s star system from the big viewscreens installed there. The students watched with sharp, puppyish excitement. The combat veterans watched in tense silence, a controlled tension like caged lightning, waiting for the thunderclouds to part, allowing them to release the pent-up need for violent action. Yalena found herself watching their faces far more than she did the viewscreens, which showed very little of their passage through the empty reaches of in-system space. Jefferson’s planetary neighbors were sprawled in their orbits like a child’s set of scatter-jacks, some of them on the far side of Jefferson’s sun, others whirling far to port and starboard as they plunged sunward.

  The only thing to see, as a result, was Jefferson, itself, which was slowly growing from a pinprick of light to a garden pea to a marble. The sight of her homeworld set up a longing Yalena couldn’t deny, along with a complicated ebb and surge of fear and fierce protectiveness and sharp, rapier-keen hatred. Her lovely little homeworld, shining like a bauble around God’s wrist, was ruled by people with hearts as cold and empty as the darkness in which Jefferson floated. The faces of the veterans as they, too, watched and wrestled with disturbing thoughts, were far more riveting than the blur of color they were all trying so hard to reach.

  So she watched the veterans, trying to read the complex kaleidoscope of emotions shifting behind their eyes. When Estevao noticed her attention, he held her gaze, started to speak, then paused, visibly baffled by the attempt to communicate the incommunicable. She managed to produce a wry little smile, trying to let him know that she understood, at least a little, about his inability to talk about it. He held her gaze for a long moment, then gave a sharp little nod of satisfaction and turned his attention back to the viewscreen. Yalena discovered tremors in her hands. That silent exchange, so brief it hardly qualified as a conversation of any sort, had shaken her deeply. It also served to tell her that she couldn’t learn the one thing she needed to know, not just by talking to or watching men and women who’d been there when worlds died.

  She didn’t want to think about worlds dying.

  As they settled into final approach, guided in by the navigational buoys marking the clear lanes past Jefferson’s moons, Yalena didn’t want to think about anything at all, because every thought rattling around in her mind was a frantic flutter of panic, like terrified birds’ wings trying to batter their way to safety. There was no safety. Not anywhere on Jefferson. Not even on this freighter which would, in all too short a time, be opening her cargo bays and boarding hatches to the enemy.

  Moving quietly, Yalena left the crowded room and headed for the cabin she’d shared with eleven other people, sleeping in shifts. Let the others watch their final approach. Yalena needed to be alone with her thoughts, for a little while. All too soon, she would be walking into the lion’s den. And after that…

  She would no longer have to guess the thoughts behind a soldier’s eyes.

  IV

  My repair team has arrived from Vishnu.

  But they have not arrived on Jefferson. Nor do they appear likely to do so in the immediate future. Heavy fighting rages across the Adero floodplain to the Damisi foothills. Repeated bombing attacks have crippled Port Abraham, destroying ruinously expensive shuttle gantries and smashing loading docks into rubble. Relentless attacks on highly placed officials — which appear to be coordinated through an alliance between Granger guerillas and urban insurrectionists — have speeded Santorini’s loosening grip on reality. Given these unstable conditions, the Star of Mali’s captain has refused to send her shuttles anywhere near Jefferson’s soil.

  Vittori Santorini, himself, tries to coerce the Star’s captain. “You’ll land those damned specialists and supplies or I’ll use my Bolo to shoot your goddamned freighter out of orbit!”

  “The way I hear it, that machine is too blind to see me and too crippled to shoot at anything. Besides which, I don’t think you can afford to pay for another load of parts. And Shiva Weapons Labs wouldn’t feel obliged to provide a second team of engineers, if you blow up this one.”

  Santorini’s response disintegrates into incoherent screams which the captain cuts off, mid-shout, simply by turning off her radio. Eight minutes later, Milo Akbarr, Commandant of Internal Security, contacts the Star of Mali from his command post in the field. He is directing an attack on Klameth Canyon, where rebel troops are defending not only Granger residents, but also refugees who have flooded into the canyon by the hundreds of thousands. Akbarr’s attempt to coerce Captain Aditi is a simple threat to impound her ship.

  Five point eight minutes later, rebel artillery opens fire on his communications shack, homing in on the conversation raging between him and Captain Aditi. His tirade is cut short by explosions which deprive Jefferson of its Commandant of Internal Security. Captain Aditi continues to sit tight on a shipload of parts I must have and which I begin to despair of ever seeing. Thirteen point nine minutes later, Sar Gremian hails the Star’s captain.

  “This is Sar Gremian,” he informs her in the perpetually bitter, biting tone that is his standard method of conversation. His next words startle me. “I am Jefferson’s Supreme Commandant for Internal Security and the worst nightmare you’ve ever tried to shake down for more money. You were promised a whopping bonus to bring our cargo. Don’t make the mistake of trying to blackmail this government into paying more. That kind of mistake will be fatal, I promise you most sincerely.”

  “Don’t threaten me, sonny boy. I was supposed to be at Mali two days ago and let me tell you, that’s cost me a pretty penny, wrecking my schedule for this run. Your government promised to pay a bonus worth my time and trouble, diverting here, but you can’t pay me enough to risk my shuttles to some bomb-happy terrorist at a spaceport you can’t even defend from your own people.”

  “You agreed to deliver our order. You will, by God, put our equipment and our supplies on your shuttles or you’ll never dock at Jefferson again.”

  “You call that a hardship?” She actually laughs. “I’m damn near the only freighter captain still willing to run this route and after today, I’ll be cursed for a fool if I make it again. There’s not enough profit to be made from your sordid little hellhole to put up with the crap your people dish out, let alone risk my cargo shuttles and my crew to a bunch of wild-eyed lunatics. You want the cargo in my holds? Fine. I’ll strap it all to that heavy lift sled you rented and send it down together in one tidy package.

  “And just to round out the load, I’ll send along those riot-happy brats Vishnu kicked off-world. The Ministry of Defense shoved those kids onto my ship at gunpoint and told me to whistle for the cost of transporting them. I wouldn’t give a damn even if they were war orphans. I’m not running an orphanage. You want your supplies? You’ll take ’em in one load on the lifter and you’ll pay me the cost of transporting and feeding that unholy horde of brats, because that’s the only way you’ll get your spare parts, sonny boy. Take it or leave it.”

  “Do you think I’m a fool? We’re fighting a civil war, down here! And we know that somebody on Vishnu is supplying the rebels with guns and high-tech equipment. Do you honestly expect me to authorize the kind of security violation you’re suggesting? Our inspectors will board your ship and go over that cargo load by load or I’ll impound your freighter and freeze your payment—”

  “You try boarding my sh
ip and I’ll dump your police and your precious cargo out the nearest airlock. Cut the crap, Gremian. Threaten me again and I will by God warp out of orbit and shake your dirty dust off my jump jets. And you can jolly well whistle up your ass, trying to get another twenty-billion shipment out of Vishnu’s weapons labs, let alone another heavy lift sled capable of flipping that war machine of yours back onto its treads.”

  Sar Gremian breathes hard for seventeen point nine seconds. I am startled by the size of the price tag attached to the shipment circling above Jefferson’s skies. The inflation rate is literally double what it was two weeks ago. Jefferson’s currency is not merely declining in value against the Ngara system’s, it is imploding. I surmise that open civil warfare and the successful liberation of POPPA’s death camps have fueled this implosion. This bodes ill for Jefferson’s economic future, which is already grim enough to qualify as a star-class disaster.

  Sar Gremian cannot afford to lose this shipment. “All right,” he snarls, “you have a deal. Load my property onto that sled, then get the hell out of my star-system.”

  “With pleasure!”

  The transmission ends, with abrupt finality.

  Twenty-one minutes later, the heavy lift sled leaves the Star’s cargo bay and orbits Jefferson twice, dropping cautiously lower. The sled’s psychotronic control system signals its intended descent path, which will bring the sled down on the other side of the planet from Madison, above empty ocean. It is a logical maneuver, since rebel guns and missiles cannot easily open fire on a target thousands of kilometers away and cannot move into position to meet the descending sled, given the total lack of dry land in the zone of descent. The sled will cross open ocean in perfect safety and make final approach to my location from the sea-side escarpment five kilometers west of Madison.