The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  That story was the Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord, the party that was promising to rescue Jefferson from all that ailed it, right down to the common cold and the clap. Virtually every broadcast station on Jefferson was carrying live feed from an open interview with Nassiona Santorini, reigning queen of POPPA. The epitome of urban sophistication, Nassiona’s loveliness arrested the eye and held most men spellbound. Her hair, dark and lustrous, conformed to a simple, uncluttered style popular with working women. Subdued colors and expensive fabrics, exquisitely cut to create an illusion of simplicity and unpretentiousness, served to impart an air of quiet, competent strength. Her voice, low and sultry, was never hurried, never strident, weaving a spell of almost mournful concern, threaded with quiet indignation at the miscarriages of justice she so earnestly enumerated.

  “—that’s exactly what it is,” she was saying to Poldi Jankovitch, a broadcaster whose popularity had risen to stunning new heights as he trumpeted the glorious message POPPA was selling to all comers. “The proposed military draft is nothing less than a death sentence with one deeply disturbing purpose: deporting the honest, urban poor of this world. We’re held in literal slavery under the guns of a ruthless off-world military regime. The Concordiat’s military machine knows nothing about what we need. What we’ve suffered and sacrificed. Nor do they care. All they want is our children, our hard-earned money, and our natural resources, as much as they can rape out of our ground at gunpoint.”

  “Those are fairly serious charges,” the broadcaster said, producing a thoughtful frown. “Have you substantiated those claims?”

  Lovely brows drew together. “Simon Khrustinov has already told us everything we need to know. Colonel Khrustinov was very clear about the Dinochrome Brigade’s agenda. We send our young people to die under alien suns or we pay a staggering penalty. The Concordiat’s so-called ‘breach of contract’ clause is nothing short of blackmail. It would destroy what little of our economy is intact after six months with John Andrews at the helm. When I think of the horrors Colonel Khrustinov’s testimony inflicted on the innocent children watching that broadcast, it breaks my heart, Pol, it just breaks my heart.”

  Kafari put down the book she’d been reading in a desultory fashion and gave Nassiona’s performance her full attention. That urbane little trollop was maligning the most courageous man on Jefferson — and the sole reason Nassiona was still alive, to sit there and spin lies about him.

  She was leaning forward, voice throbbing with emotional pain. “I’ve spoken to frightened little girls who wake up screaming, at night, because of what that man said. Those children are traumatized, terrified out of their minds. It’s unforgivable, what he said during an open, live broadcast. How the Brigade considers a man as cold and battle-hardened as a robot to be fit for command — let alone defense of an entire, peaceful society — is a question POPPA wants answered.”

  Women in the waiting room were starting to mutter, agreeing in angry tones.

  “And we’ve all seen,” Nassiona added, voice artfully outraged, “what that monstrous machine he commands is capable of, haven’t we? How many homes were destroyed by so-called friendly fire? How many people who died were killed unnecessarily by that thing’s guns?”

  The clever little bitch… Nassiona didn’t need to answer those questions. They weren’t meant to be answered. Just by asking them, she’d implanted the notion that there was an answer, a horrible answer, without ever having to actually come right out and make an accusation she couldn’t support. Judging by the angry buzz running through the waiting room, the tactic was working.

  Nassiona leaned forward, posture and voice conveying the urgency of her worry. “POPPA has spent a great deal of its own money trying to discover just what Khrustinov and that machine of his are legally allowed to do. It’s terrifying, Pol. Just terrifying. At odds with everything Jefferson has ever believed in. Did you know that Bolos are supposed to be switched off between battles? As a routine precaution to ensure the safety of civilians? Yet that death machine on our soil is never turned off. It watches us, day and night, and what it thinks…”

  She gave a beautifully contrived shudder. “You see the trap we’re caught in, Pol. We have to comply with their threats. And it’s got to stop. John Andrews certainly won’t stop it. He relies on that thing, uses it deliberately to terrify the rest of us into swallowing the disastrous policies he enforces. There’s only one way to stop it, Pol, and that’s for the honest, decent people of Jefferson to vote for someone who will demand that Colonel Khrustinov shut that thing down like he should have long ago. We need to elect officials who aren’t afraid to tell the Concordiat and the Brigade that we’ve had enough of their threats and their demands and their war-crazed madness. We need officials who aren’t taking advantage of the situation to further their careers and build their personal fortunes.”

  Kafari did a not-so-slow burn. Nassiona Santorini was the daughter of a Tayari Trade Consortium tycoon. She’d been born with a diamond spoon in her mouth. And Tayari’s profit margin was higher now than it had been before the Deng invasion. Tayari had bought every fishing trawler still in operation on Jefferson, gobbling up the smaller operations during the postwar havoc, which meant Tayari owned — lock, stock, and barrel — the only means of obtaining the main commodity Jefferson was required to supply to the Concordiat.

  As a result, Tayari was exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of Terran-processed fish to the Concordiat, which was — per treaty — paying for it at a higher rate than the same fish could be marketed on Jefferson. Malinese miners and fighting soldiers weren’t as finicky as sophisticated urbanites about what ended up on their dinner plates. Tayari was raking in tons of money, as a result, and a great deal of that money ended up in trust funds set up for Vittori and Nassiona Santorini. The interest income from that money — invested shrewdly, off-world, in Malinese mining stock — had given POPPA a vast source of income that was sheltered from the shocks jarring Jefferson’s economy. POPPA’s war-chest — or anti-war chest, given the party’s political platform — was vastly larger than the pool of money any other candidate for office could hope to raise.

  Yet Nassiona Santorini and her brother, already rich and rapidly getting richer, had the unmitigated gall to accuse John Andrews of doing what they did every single day. Why weren’t the big broadcast companies pointing that out? Had objective reporting gone out the window, along with every other scruple Kafari had been raised to honor? From what Kafari had seen, Pol Jankovitch never asked any POPPA spokesperson a question that might have an unfavorable answer.

  His next question, delivered with a thoughtful frown, was typical. “Given the treaty stipulations and the gun to our heads, what can we do about the situation? Our backs are against the wall, on this thing. How would POPPA candidates change that?”

  “We must start where we can. The most important thing, and we must do it immediately, is make sure the burden of obeying the Concordiat’s demands is fairly shared. If you examine the lobbying record of the big agricultural interest groups, for instance, you’ll discover a sorry litany of protests that their children should be exempt from military quotas. Why should farmers enjoy special privileges? This world was founded on principles of equality, fair dealing, individual worth, freedom. Not pandering to wealthy special interest groups!”

  Nassiona’s dark eyes flashed with outrage. “And what do the farmers clamoring for special treatment give as reasons for their demands? Nothing but flimsy, money-hungry excuses! They need more labor to terraform new acreage. To plant thousands of new fields nobody needs. And they’re damaging pristine ecosystems to do it, too. Why? They have one interest. Just one, Pol. Lining their pockets with cold, hard cash. They’re not interested in feeding children in mining towns, children who go to bed hungry at night. Whose parents can’t even afford medical care.

  “It’s time we faced facts, Pol. The surplus of stored foods set aside for civil emergencies is so large, we could feed the entire popula
tion of Jefferson for five full years. Without planting a single stalk of corn! It’s time to stop this nonsense. Time to make sure that no one benefits unfairly. No special deals, Pol, no special privileges. That’s what POPPA is demanding. Fair and equal treatment for everyone. Equal sharing of the risk, the burden of compliance. No protection for special groups who think they’re better than the rest of us. No under-the-table deals with elitists who think their lives are worth more than the rest of us, worth more than the lives of people thrown out of work through no fault of their own. It’s immoral, Pol, grossly immoral and it must stop, now.”

  Kafari’s slow burn went hot as liquid steel. If the burden of meeting troop quotas was “fairly shared,” urban residents had a long, long way to go, just to catch up. Almost ninety-eight percent of the nearly twenty thousand troops shipped off-world to date had been Granger-bred volunteers. There was literally no chance in a million that any planetary draft would ever be instituted, let alone rammed through today or next week. Not only were elected officials dead-set against it, not wanting to slit their own throats at the polls, it wasn’t needed. Granger volunteers had consistently exceeded the Concordiat’s minimum quotas.

  As for “special deals,” agricultural producers couldn’t afford to lose any more of their labor pool. Nearly five thousand people had died in Klameth Canyon, including some of the region’s best expertise in animal husbandry and terraforming biogenetics. Most of the volunteers who’d shipped out had come from the Klameth Canyon complex, as well, men and women too angry, too haunted by the ghosts of loved ones who’d died on their land, too financially broke to start over. Come the harvest, those who’d remained on Jefferson would be hard-pressed to take up the burden.

  What was wrong with people like Nassiona Santorini? Or the people who believed her? Didn’t the truth matter to anyone, any longer? The ob-gyn clinic’s waiting room was crammed full of people who apparently had no interest in the truth, judging by conversations on all sides. What she was hearing gave Kafari a deep sense of foreboding.

  “Y’know, my sister went looking at the POPPA datasite, the other night, called me on the ’net-phone, she was so mad. Said the government’s fixin’ to drill right through the Meerland Sanctuary to get at the iron deposits. If they start strip-mining out there, it’ll contaminate the water all the way down the Damisi watershed and poison us all!”

  “Well, I can tell you, every single person in my family is votin’ the same way. We’re fixin’ to kick President Andrews’ ass out of a job. We gotta get somebody in there who knows what it’s like to have half the folks in your neighborhood outta work and damn near killin’ themselves with despair a’ gettin’ any…”

  Kafari couldn’t listen to any more of it. She headed toward the bathrooms, stopping briefly at the receptionist’s desk to tell them where she’d be, and closed the door on the mindless babble in the waiting room. She preferred to sit in a public lavatory that smelt of air fresheners and stale urine than listen to any more of POPPA’s silver-spun lies or the braying of jackasses who believed them. She understood, profoundly, the impact joblessness had on a person, a family. She understood the loss of self-worth, the sense of helplessness it engendered, had watched members of her family and close friends stricken by one such blow after another.

  But POPPA’s brand of swill wasn’t the answer. To anything. Kafari wet a small towel and laved her face and throat, trying to calm down the gut-churning anger and the nausea it had triggered. She drew several deep, slow breaths, reminding herself of things for which she was thankful. She was profoundly grateful to have her job. And not just any job, either, but a good one, a job that tested her skills, her ingenuity, and let her contribute to the all-important job of rebuilding.

  Having passed her practicum with flying colors — due as much to Sonny’s tutelage as to the rigorous courses necessary to secure a psychotronic systems engineering degree — she’d taken a job at Madison’s spaceport, which was being rebuilt almost from the ground up. As part of a ground-based team of psychotronic specialists, she worked in tandem with orbital engineers, calibrating the new space station’s psychotronic systems as each new module was mated with the others in orbit, then synched to the spaceport’s ground-based controllers. High-tech labs on Vishnu had supplied the replacement components for Ziva Two, including the modules Kafari was responsible for correctly calibrating, programming, and fitting into the existing psychotronic computer matrix.

  Difficult as it was, she loved her job. With luck, her work would create the chance for others to work, again, as well. Madison’s northwest sector, hit so hard during the fighting, was now jammed with construction crews.

  By some small miracle, the Engineering Hub — the nerve center of any surface-based spaceport — had survived, undamaged by Deng missiles. With that infrastructure intact, the cost of rebuilding was far lower than it might have been, despite obfuscations by POPPA’s chosen spokespersons.

  Everywhere POPPA turned its attention, discord followed. Kafari had been less than amused to learn that a major POPPA rally had been scheduled for the same afternoon as her follow-up appointment with the ob-gyn clinic. She should’ve been able to finish her appointment and leave well in advance of the rally’s starting time, but she’d already been here an hour-and-a-half, waiting while emergency cases came into the clinic and bumped others with appointments. There’d been more than a dozen walk-ins so far, all of them presenting the emergency medical vouchers issued to the jobless and their families. Those vouchers meant a patient had to be seen, regardless of caseload, regardless of the bearer’s ability to pay anything for the services of physicians, nurse-practitioners, or medical technicians conducting diagnostic testing.

  Kafari was not coldhearted, even though she questioned the long-term sustainability of such a program, and certainly didn’t feel that those without money should be denied access to medical care they — and in this case, their unborn children — needed. But it was a financial drain their faltering economy couldn’t possibly maintain for long. It was downright irritating that she’d missed half an afternoon’s work to keep an appointment that others had bumped, by just walking in off the street. And if she didn’t get out of the clinic soon, she’d be caught right in the middle of the crush gathering for the POPPA rally scheduled to begin in an hour’s time. There was already an immense crowd outside, streaming through downtown Madison toward the rally’s main stage, which had been set up in Lendan Park, across Darconi Street from Assembly Hall.

  There wasn’t much she could do about any of it, however, and Kafari needed this appointment. So she dried her face carefully, reapplied cosmetics, and returned to the waiting room, where she eased herself down into a chair and tried without much success to ignore the news coverage of the impending rally. An entire host of POPPA luminaries appeared on camera, granting interviews that constituted little more than a steady stream of POPPA doctrine, most of it aimed directly at the masses of unemployed urbanites. Gust Ordwyn, rumored to be Vittori Santorini’s right-hand propagandist, was holding forth on the manufacturing crisis that had sent heavy industry crashing to a virtual halt.

  “We can’t afford five more years of President Andrews’ insane policies on mining and manufacturing. Jefferson’s mines stand silent and empty. Sixteen thousand miners have lost their jobs, their medical coverage, their very homes. John Andrews doesn’t even have a plan to put these people back to work! Enough is enough.

  Jefferson needs new answers. New ideas. A new philosophy for rebuilding our economy. One that includes the needs of ordinary, hard-working men and women, not the profit margin of a huge conglomerate that holds half its assets off-world. I ask you, Pol, why do Jefferson’s biggest companies transfer their profits off-world when our own people are jobless and starving? Why do they pour huge sums of money into off-world technology instead of rebuilding our own factories, so people can go back to work? It’s indecent, it’s unethical. It’s got to stop.”

  Pol Jankovitch, predictably, did nothing
at all to point out that Gust Ordwyn’s accusations, like Nassiona Santorini’s “questions” were not designed to be answered factually, but to insinuate a state of affairs that did not, in fact, exist. Kafari was in a position to know exactly what was being ordered from off-world companies: high-tech items Jefferson literally could not manufacture yet.

  Pol Jankovitch wasn’t interested in the truth. Neither was his boss, media mogul Dexter Courtland. They were interested solely in what message was likeliest to increase viewership, advertising profits, and personal bank accounts. Men like Vittori Santorini and Gust Ordwyn used fools like Courtland and Jankovitch, in an under-the-table handshake that benefitted everyone involved. Except, of course, the average Jeffersonian. And most of them were blinded by the rhetoric, the wild promises of wealth, the feeling of power that comes with participating in something big enough to make the government sit up and take notice.

  None of which bolstered Kafari’s low spirits.

  Neither did the next three speakers. Camden Cathmore was a spin expert who constantly quoted the latest results of his favorite tool, the “popular sentiment” poll, so blatantly manipulated, the results meant nothing at all. Carin Avelaine bleated endlessly about “socially conscious education programs” she wanted to implement. And then there was Khroda Arpad, a refugee from one of the hard-hit worlds beyond the Silurian Void, who spoke passionately about the horrors of war as experienced first-hand. She had lost her children in the fighting, which left Kafari’s heart aching for her, but Kafari was less impressed by the direction Khroda’s grief had taken her. The refugee had launched a crusade to convince as many people as possible that a planet-wide military draft was about to be enacted for the purpose of sending as many of the urban poor and their children as possible to be shot to pieces under alien guns.