by John Ringo
That was Simon’s job. He was here to teach them.
He’d spent the past week doing exactly that. Tonight’s meeting wasn’t the beginning of the process, it was the beginning of the end. Of a lot of things. Simon’s guide was a smallish woman in the earlier years of middle age. Maria was her name, the only name she’d given him. She had that bowed-down, exhausted look that was a hallmark of grinding poverty and hopelessness. Maria had barely spoken to him since their cautious meeting at the prearranged spot where the urban guerillas had agreed to rendezvous with him. Whoever she was, Maria was as thin as the ragged children and moved like a woman fifty years older than her probable true age.
As they passed the angry men on the street corners, men who stared at him — a stranger in their midst — with dagger-sharp hatred, Maria nodded a silent greeting to them. That gesture, made again and again, defused what might’ve swiftly resulted in a lethal confrontation. He’s with me, I vouch for him, that gesture meant, making it clear that the stranger who’d thrust himself into their ugly little corner of a once-beautiful world had, in fact, been invited. Simon had no doubt at all that he would’ve been waylaid, murdered without a moment’s pity, and stripped like a dead chicken if he’d dared walk in here alone. He knew, as well, that nobody would’ve bothered to stop them. Not even the P-Squads would patrol these particular streets, not unless they traveled in packs of at least six officers armed like jaglitch hunters.
They passed bars that exuded alcoholic fumes, their grimy interiors artificially bright with the grating laughter that comes from bitter, hopeless people whose sole outlet is to get drunk. They stepped across several of the drunkest, who’d crawled out of the bar and collapsed on the street. After walking for nearly half an hour, they rounded a corner and interrupted a business transaction between a teenage girl whose breasts were the only plump part of her and a man who looked like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a loose sack.
Maria broke stride, staring hard at the girl. Whoever she was, she flushed crimson. Then she stammered out something unintelligible and fled through the rapidly gathering shadows of dusk. The man she’d been bargaining with sent a screeching curse after her. He swung abruptly toward Maria.
“Y’damned bitch! I’d already give ’er the money!”
“That’s your own fault, you fool! You give a whore money after she’s done what you hired ’er for. Now get your filthy bones off my street an’ don’t come back. I swear t’ God and all the devils in hell, I’ll break your skinny neck, if I see you back in these parts.”
For a long, dangerous moment, Simon braced himself to prevent a murder. He shifted his weight, ready to move, but the other man darted a swift glance at Simon and let the moment — and his money — pass away without further protest. He sidled into a noxious alleyway, cursing under his breath. Simon flexed his fingers, shaking the tension loose. Maria tilted her head slightly, casting a glance upward from beneath hooded eyes.
“He’d a’ killed you.”
“He could’ve tried.”
She studied him for a moment. “You might be right, at that. C’mon, we’re nearly there.”
She led him further down the street, in the direction the girl had fled, then opened a door sandwiched in between a boarded-up storefront that had once sold groceries and what looked like a combination self-service laundrey and betting parlor, judging by the number of frowsy, bitter-faced women playing cards and the even greater number of men rolling dice while the machines jigged and bumped and rattled their syncopated rhythm, cleaning what few clothes these people owned.
The door Maria opened led to a stairway barely wide enough for one person to climb. The first landing gave onto a corridor with only one door, presumably leading into a storage room above the laundry. Maria climbed to the second floor, where a line of apartment doors stretched away down the corridor, their faded paint bearing the numerals assigned to each cramped residence. Maria led the way to the third from the end. They stepped inside — and found the girl they had interrupted on the street below.
She flushed crimson again.
“Get supper started,” Maria said in a cold, angry voice.
“Yes’m,” the girl whispered, rolling her eyes at Simon before she fled into an adjoining room.
Simon didn’t know what to say. Maria shut her eyes for a moment, but not before Simon caught a glimpse of the tears in them. When she opened her eyes, again, she met Simon’s distressed gaze. “She’s not a wicked girl.”
“No.”
“Just… desperate.”
“Yes.”
“It’s why I told that creep…” She halted.
“Yes,” Simon said again. “I know. I have a daughter. Just a couple of years older than yours.”
She slanted a look up at him, a look at once shuttered and painfully clear. Then a sigh tore loose. “That’s different, then, innit?” She didn’t say anything else, but Simon understood. Her lips vanished in a bitter, white-clenched line that slashed across the weariness and the pain on her face. Then she spoke again, voice brusque. “They’ll be here in a bit. We got nuthin’ fancier to offer than water, if you’re thirsty?”
“Water’s fine, thank you.”
She nodded. “Find a chair, then. I still got one or two. I’ll be back.”
Simon studied the tiny living room, with its government-supplied viewscreen and a few cheap pictures on the wall. The pictures were religious. The viewscreen was a standard model of the type issued by the POPPA propaganda machine, with its vested interest in reaching the masses. The furniture was cheap, much-mended, and mismatched, but the whole place was neat and fresh-scrubbed, in contrast with other tenements they’d passed. Unlike her neighbors, Maria had not given up hope.
Simon discovered a profound respect for the woman. She must have been holding herself and her family together with little more than determination, for a long time, now. The knowledge that her little girl was selling herself on the streets must’ve been a blow that struck to the heart, made worse for having been witnessed by a stranger here to help. She returned from the kitchen, where that selfsame daughter was busy rustling through cabinets and banging pots and implements around, in a subdued and careful fashion that suggested she was trying to tiptoe around her mother’s temper.
“Got no ice,” Maria said, holding out the glass, “but there’s a jug in the icebox that’s cold and plenty more from the tap.”
Simon nodded his thanks and sipped. The pause between them was awkward, but it didn’t last long, because someone tapped at the door, in a definite pattern that was clearly a code. Maria slanted another glance in his direction. Simon stepped back, so that he was behind the door when she opened it.
“Come in,” she said in a whisper, “an’ be quick about it!”
An instant later a gasp broke from her. Simon caught a glimpse of her face as the door swung shut. She was staring, ash-pale, at one of the men who’d just stepped into the room, swinging the door quickly shut behind them.
“You’re alive!” The whisper held a shocked, knife-edge throb, part pain, part unbearable joy.
The boy she was staring at said, “Yeah. So’s… so’s Uncle Phil. We couldn’t tell you…”
Her mouth began to shake. The boy just opened his arms. She flung herself forward and engulfed him in a death-hold embrace. Tears streamed unheeded down her face. Maria’s daughter came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a plate on which she’d stacked a few crackers and some cubes of cheese. She looked up and saw the boy her mother was hugging so tightly. The tray fell from nerveless fingers. The plate shattered on the bare floorboards. An agonized moan broke from her, then she, too, hurled herself forward, threw both arms around the bits of him she could reach, and started to cry in jagged sobs. His resemblance to Maria and her daughter was obvious enough to name the kinship without hesitation. The prodigal son had come home. Evidently from the dead. Given his emaciated condition, he’d probably been rescued from one of the death camps.
There w
ere two other men with the boy. Simon hadn’t met them. When the worst of the emotional storm had passed, one of them said, “Listen, we got work t’do, see? There’s a helluva lot goin’ on, tonight, and we got things to take care of, so how’s about we grab a bite of whatever’s on the stove and get to it?”
Maria pulled herself together, bestowed a smile on her son, even managed to smile at her daughter, cupping one hand to wipe tears from the girl’s ravaged face, then said gently, “Let’s clean up, eh?”
The girl nodded.
They weren’t talking about tear-streaked faces or shattered plates.
Five minutes later, they sat down at Maria’s kitchen table. They made short work of the meal, such as it was, and settled in the living room to map out their strategy. They’d barely begun when Simon’s wrist-comm lit up, screaming with an emergency code. He slapped it. “Report!”
“We’re under attack!” The terror in that familiar, beloved voice wrenched at Simon’s heart. “They’re using biologicals or chemicals, I don’t know which! I’ve ordered everyone into the shelters, but there aren’t enough. Oh, God, we’re dying by the thousands, out here…”
His wrist-comm screamed again, on a different emergency frequency. The second voice shouted, “The government’s ordered us out of the Bolo’s maintenance depot, at gunpoint. They’re loading him onto the heavy-lift platform…”
The datascreen in Maria’s living room clanged to life, sounding an alarm that meant a government broadcast was about to begin, important enough that every citizen of Jefferson had better drop whatever they were doing and pay attention. The screen lit up with a view of the Presidential Palace’s private broadcast studio. Vittori Santorini was standing at the podium. The wall behind him blazed with the green and gold peace banners of the POPPA party.
“Beloved friends,” he said, “we have gathered here this evening to share with you our final triumph over the criminals running the Granger rebellion. We have known fear, my friends, unending fear and far too much death. But tonight there is blessed hope on our horizon, hope and a promise — my personal pledge — that after tonight, the good and loyal people Jefferson need never fear the hand of oppression again.
“Even now, our courageous Bolo is back in the field. He will smite the unholy. Crush the wicked underfoot. Jefferson will be safe forever. Safe from the menace of Granger hatred. Safe from the threat of bombs and bullets. Safe from the destruction those monsters have visited on us for so many years…”
Simon had stopped listening. “Oh, dear, God,” he whispered.
Maria’s son had gone deathly pale. “Th’ stinkin’ bastards!”
Simon touched his wrist-comm again. “Red Dog, are you there?”
“Yes,” Kafari’s voice came back, muffled and strange through the voice-altering technology she’d used for four years, now. “I’m here.”
“They’re sending the Bolo out. It’s heading your way on the lifter. How many people can you get out?”
“I don’t know. Not many. They fired conventional artillery and biochemicals into the canyon, simultaneously. Most of my people are dead. Or they’re cut off from escape, wearing biohazard gear and can’t risk hiking out through rough country and ripping their suits on the rocks. Dinny’s gone.” Her voice wavered. “He died saving our little girl.”
Simon’s eyes stung. He closed his fingers around the edge of the table, unable to speak. Gratitude and grief choked him into silence.
Kafari went on, horror seeping through despite the techno-altered voice. “Some of us had biocontainment gear. Not nearly enough. I have no idea how many survivors I’ve got. There are two with me,” she added, voice hoarse. “We sounded the sirens, but I don’t know how many had time to reach shelter. Some of the farmers and ranchers probably made it. Our surveillance cameras are picking up images of the dead…” Her voice broke on a sob. “Oh, Simon, so many… They’re already hitting us again. With conventional artillery. God knows how long the shelling will last, this time.”
Kafari’s whole family — and Simon’s — lived in that canyon. The sickness in his heart twisted, lanced like jagged lightning through every nerve. His hands ached from wanting to close his fists around Vittori Santorini’s throat. The silence in Maria’s living room was the silence of wounded men and women just before the scream bursts loose, still too stunned by the shock of the mortal blow to give sound to the agony. Their careful plans had crashed to the floor in pieces, like the plate Maria’s daughter had shattered just minutes ago.
Kafari added with bitter exhaustion in her voice, “We don’t have many gunners left. The P-Squads can waltz in here any time they want, unopposed.”
“They won’t need to,” Simon bit out. “They’ve got Sonny. Even blind as a bat, he’s more than enough to take out any survivors. If I know Vittori Santorini, he’ll order Sonny to blow every damned farmhouse in the whole maze to hell, just to be sure he got them all.” Simon realized in that moment what he had to do. The pain of it stabbed like a hot knife. He should have used the damned destruct code the moment he’d arrived. Vittori might still have destroyed Klameth Canyon. But without the Bolo to back up his regime, would he have dared?
Simon had betrayed half a million people to their deaths.
The agony of Etaine hurt less than the knowledge that he had killed those people by failing to act, just as surely as Vittori Santorini had, when POPPA’s founder had given the order to fire those biochemical warheads. On the datascreen, Vittori was telling the whole world about his sainted plans for a Granger-free universe. Face alight with an unholy ecstacy, he spoke joyously about the refugees trapped in Klameth Canyon, the “enemies of the people” who lay dead in the gathering darkness under Jefferson’s rising moons.
Simon couldn’t help those already murdered. But he could by God save others. He had spent half his life as Sonny’s commander and still thought of the machine as a friend. But now, in the moment when lives hung in the balance — the survivors in Klameth Canyon’s maze, hundreds of thousands of Grangers scattered throughout other fortified canyons in the Damisi Mountains, millions of urban dissidents in the cities — he found that which he had dreaded for so long was remarkably easy to put into practice.
He switched frequencies and transmitted the code he had carried in memory from the day he had been assigned as Sonny’s commander. The code that would wipe Sonny’s Action/Command core and kill him. He closed his eyes for a moment, mourning a friend and hating the men who had turned a protector into a mailed fist enabling mass murderers to stay in power. Nobody spoke, which was a mercy. He finally switched back to the original frequency. “Are you there?” he asked in a strangled voice.
“Yes. We can see the Bolo, now. His lander’s just touched down at Maze Gap. Sonny’s off-loading, heading through the Gap. The federal troops have pulled back—”
“What?” Horror congealed in the basement of Simon’s soul. “He’s moving? On his own?”
“Yes. He’s passing through the Gap, now, turning into the main canyon. He’s coming to the dam.”
Maria, her face white and scared, swam into his awareness when she clutched his arm, asking, “What’s wrong?”
Simon met her gaze. He didn’t recognize his own voice. “They’ve changed the destruct codes. I can’t kill the Bolo.”
“You can’t kill the Bolo? Destruct codes?” Maria was staring at him. “What do you mean by that? Who the hell are you, anyway?”
Simon met her gaze, still feeling numb from the shock. “Simon Khrustinov,” he said hoarsely. “I’m Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo’s last commander.”
Maria’s daughter, busy cleaning the table, dropped and shattered another plate.
“You don’t look like—” Maria broke off mid-sentence. Her eyes, already wide, went suddenly wet as she stared at his face. The face even he wasn’t used to, yet, after four years of staring in the mirror at it. “The crash,” she whispered. She didn’t seem to realize that she was crying. “I forgot about the crash. Your face got
smashed up in the aircar crash, didn’t it?”
He just nodded.
“You can’t kill it? Really can’t kill it?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, God…”
There did not seem to be a whole hell of a lot else to say. Not to the people who’d gathered in this room, trying to help him end the threat that had just claimed half a million lives. He spoke to Kafari, again. “Red Dog, can you evacuate?”
“No. There aren’t any aircars left. They hit our landing field, blew it to ashes. The forest fire’s still raging, out there. And we’d rip our suits open trying to hike out across the Damisi. We’re trapped right where we are.”
In a box canyon with a Bolo Mark XX on its way to blow them to hell. Simon had never felt more helpless. At least on Etaine, he and Sonny had been fighting on the same side…
“They’ve changed the code,” he said in a voice he did not recognize.
Kafari didn’t have to ask which one. “Understood,” she said. Then she added two more words that broke his heart and put steel into his resolve. “Avenge us.”
“Oh, yes,” he whispered. “On the graves of Etaine’s murdered millions, I swear that, my love. Kiss Yalena for me.”
“I love you,” the voice of his soul-mate whispered.
Then the connection went silent. When Simon dragged his attention back to the little room where Vittori flickered silently on the viewscreen and the urban guerillas stood staring at him, Maria whispered, “That was Commodore Oroton.” It wasn’t really a question. “The commodore’s your wife, isn’t he?”