The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  Her breath caught in her lungs for one horrified instant. Then she pulled the door the rest of the way off its hinges. She clattered down the stairs, found herself rushing through a building eerily empty by daylight. The dance hall was full of ghostly, discordant shadows. Memories lingered, revelries filled with the intoxicating taste of ruling-class luxury and power. Dusty shafts of sunlight lent the room a surreal, churchlike atmosphere, while outside, a rising shriek of terror, metal against bone, ran thick as blood.

  She found another staircase that took her from the dance floor to the street level. She emerged into a restaurant that fronted Darconi Street. The restaurant was packed with people. More were trying to shove through the door, creating the worst log-jam of human bodies Kafari had ever witnessed. The only way to cross the restaurant was by going up. Kafari jumped onto the nearest table and started running, leaping from one table to the next, scattering cutlery and water glasses and plates full of food. People around her were screaming, but she hardly heard them over the volcanic roar in the street.

  When she reached the tables closest to the windows, she searched frantically for her daughter in the crowd beyond. The signal on Kafari’s wrist-comm said she was close, so close, she ought to be able to see her daughter by now. “YALENA!”

  Screaming at the top of her voice made about as much noise as a bee’s wings trying to flee an erupting volcano. Then she spotted a wild shock of neon-green hair and recognized Yalena’s best friend, Ami-Lynn. Charmaine was with her, too. And there was Yalena. They were close to the sidewalk, caught in a mass of people with nowhere to go. For Yalena, there was no way in. For Kafari, there was no way out.

  So she made one.

  Kafari snatched up an overturned chair and threw it at the plate glass. The window shattered, raining slivers onto the heads of stunned people on the sidewalk, who couldn’t quite believe that somebody would want to go out instead of in. “Yalena!”

  Her daughter looked around, saw her standing in the shattered window.

  “MOM!”

  “Get through the window! Sonny’s coming!”

  Yalena looked back, saw the Bolo for the first time. Her eyes, streaming and blood-red from the retch gas, widened. “Oh — my — God—”

  She started shoving her way toward Kafari. Other people were moving toward the broken window. Terror-stricken people, who shoved against the splintered glass, pushed the broken shards out of their way, climbed across the busted-out sill. Kafari snatched people up by shirt collars, belts, the backs of expensive dresses, throwing them into the restaurant. Anything to clear enough space for Yalena to reach the window. Her daughter was fighting through the crowd, dragging Ami-Lynn and Charmaine with her. The roar from the street was bone-shaking. Sonny’s massive warhull blocked the fading twilight, half-a-block away and coming like a flintsteel tide. She could hear his voice, familiar, horrifying. He was broadcasting loudly enough that the words were clearly audible, even above the roar.

  “I have been ordered by President Zeloc to run over anyone between me and the Presidential Residence. Clear the streets. I have been ordered…”

  Yalena was two meters away… a meter and a half… a meter from Kafari’s outstretched hand. “Come on!” she shouted, “Keep moving!”

  People were struggling to pass her, trying to shove Yalena out of the way. A big, beefy lout with a broken signpost in each fist was clubbing people, trying to reach the window where Kafari had created the only way out of the street. He started to swing at Yalena—

  Kafari ripped the gun loose from her holster and fired. From a meter and a half out, the bullet slammed into his face like a sledgehammer. It left a stunned expression of disbelief on his face. And a hole straight through his braincase. The club slid from his hand and he toppled, falling against a woman behind him.

  Yalena lunged forward. Ami-Lynn and Charmaine tripped and fell. Both girls went down. Just beyond, Sonny’s treads were the only thing she could see. The immense treads were red, drenched in blood and other things…

  “Yalena!” Kafari screamed, tearing her throat. The world paused. Everything came to a ghastly standstill. The crush of people, the crackle of heat, the wind. Even Sonny. Just long enough. Kafari leaned out into a tunnel of silence. Grabbed her daughter’s hand. Hauled her across the broken glass. Then Yalena was in her arms. She dragged her daughter away from the window, making room for others. She couldn’t see Ami-Lynn or Charmaine anywhere.

  Then a massive shadow blocked the sunlight. Darkness engulfed the little restaurant, like a sudden eclipse of the sun. Sound roared back into her ears. The walls rattled. Overhead lights jangled. Dishes danced, some of them crashing to the floor. Nightmare memories broke loose, memories of the ground shaking under her feet as titans fought to possess it. Only this time, the titans weren’t defending them. Sonny’s treads scraped the edges of the restaurant. Kafari turned her head, unable to watch the slaughter of those still outside, but the screams were etched onto the marrow of her bones.

  Yalena clung to her, sobbing and trembling. The ghastly silence that followed in the Bolo’s wake was almost worse than the screaming. Nobody seemed willing to move. Sonny kept grinding his way toward the Presidential Residence. The farther he moved toward it, the worse the silence grew.

  The sudden discharge of his guns sent a shockwave through the jam-packed restaurant. Screams erupted again. Yalena jumped in Kafari’s arms. Kafari shut her eyes, not even wanting to know what he’d just fired at. All she wanted was to get her baby out of this horror. With her aircar a wreck on the roof, she didn’t have the faintest idea how to get out. They couldn’t walk out, that was certain. She had no desire to tangle with the P-Squads who’d made sure their victims couldn’t escape.

  Worse, she was carrying a gun. Had shot a man with it, in front of several hundred witnesses, any one of whom could put Kafari in jail or a rehab facility for life. This was mostly an urban crowd, people who already hated Grangers and their so-called “cult of violence.” They were more than capable of lynch-mob destruction if provoked.

  They had just been provoked.

  She shook Yalena and said in a low, urgent voice, “C’mon, baby, we’ve got to go. Now.” Yalena looked up through swollen, tear-reddened eyes. “Wh-where are Ami-Lynn and…” Her voice trailed off when she realized her friends weren’t in the restaurant with them. She started to get up. Looked out the broken window before Kafari could stop her. Turned dead-fish white. The shock in her eyes ran to the bottom of her soul.

  In that moment of acid-etched pain, the girl POPPA had stolen from them abruptly proved herself Simon Khrustinov’s daughter. Her eyes went hard and her chin came up. She spat through the window, the most eloquent gesture of defiance Kafari had ever witnessed. Then she stood up on shaking legs and started looking for exits.

  “Across the tables.” Kafari said, grimly pulling her daughter behind her. They retraced Kafari’s path a little drunkenly, since many of the tables had been knocked over in the panic-stricken crush of refugees. Most of those refugees looked up in numb silence, too shell-shocked to respond to their exodus. Given time — maybe as little as two or three minutes — that stunned crowd was going to transform itself into an unholy killing mob.

  They made it to the staircase and fled silently upwards, reaching the dance hall’s cathedral solitude. Kafari closed the upper doors softly and slid part of a microphone stand from the stage through the door handles, forming an effective if temporary lock.

  Once the door was as secure as she could make it, Kafari turned to survey the room. The damage from Sonny’s passage was apparent, even here. Some of the stained glass had been broken out. Yalena was having trouble walking. For reasons she didn’t have time to determine, her daughter was staring at Kafari in a way nobody had since Abraham Lendan had met her gaze across the rubble of a refuse-strewn cellar, asking her what to do next.

  “We have to get out of Madison. This part of it, anyway. Those folks downstairs are going to start looking for somebody to bla
me. I have no intention of that someone being us.”

  Yalena looked like she wanted to ask something important, but didn’t want to interrupt their escape to do it. “What do we do?” she asked, instead.

  “We find food and water we can carry and we get the hell out of this building.”

  A curtain concealed the back of the stage. Kafari headed that way, betting there were dressing rooms where band members grabbed a bite to eat between dance sets. They found a small kitchenette stocked with food and plenty of beverages. “Fill your pockets. In fact, grab some of those costumes,” she nodded toward a rack full of glittering clothing, “and tie off sleeves and pants legs to form carry-sacks. God knows how long we’re going to have to hide before it’s safe to come out.”

  “Where…” She got her voice under control. “Where are we going to hide?”

  “I’m trying to work that out. We’re short on time and options are limited. Do you have a hand-comp with you?”

  Yalena shook her head. Kafari’s was sitting on the passenger seat of her aircar, or had been before that wild skid. “Mine’s in the aircar. I’ve got to know what’s happening. If you hear anyone trying to break down those doors, head for the roof and we’ll figure something out.”

  “The aircar? Can’t we just fly out?”

  Kafari grimaced. “No. The P-Squads shot me down. More or less. I crashed on the roof.”

  “Oh. God, that must’ve been…” Her voice trailed off, helplessly.

  Kafari summoned a brief grin that stunned her daughter. “The landing was nothing to the flying I did, getting here ahead of Sonny. I had to fly all the way from Klameth Canyon.”

  Yalena’s chin shook for a dangerous moment and she blinked hard, then she just nodded and started dumping food and bottled water into the makeshift carry sacks. Kafari headed for the roof. She was worried about the wrecked aircar. It had her identification in it, some of her personal belongings. When it was noticed, someone was going to start poking around, looking for the owner. That attempt might lead to a number of very unpleasant outcomes.

  The broken door was still ajar from her frantic rush down. She took a quick look around, then crouched low and sprinted for the aircar. The damage was evident at once. The airframe had tipped slightly on its skid across the roof, tilting it enough to see the hole where a riot gun had punched through the relatively thin outer hull. The pilot’s compartment had been reinforced heavily, but the alloy in the airframe, itself, was of necessity lightweight. A 20mm slug had chewed its way through the housing and sliced into an assembly that fed power from the drive engines to the lift vanes. No wonder she’d lost acceleration. If she could replace the damaged module, they could fly out.

  She didn’t feel like scrounging for a replacement, not with the kind of security that would be crawling all over them, pretty soon. From her perch atop the roof, she could see Sonny’s warhull. He had halted at the edge of the lawn around the Presidential Residence. A crowd of people had surged over the high fence, fleeing the Bolo’s treads. Most of the people in it were busy running away as fast as mere feet could carry them. Then Kafari blinked, suspicious for a moment that her eyes were playing tricks on her in the drifts and eddies of riot gas in the last of the twilight. It had looked at first glance like the Residence was burning. Then she saw flames in the upper-story windows. It was burning.

  Somehow, in the middle of the craziness, the Residence had been torched. By Sonny? She found that hard to believe, although it looked like a dark line of holes had been stitched across the side of the building, just to the left of the famous rose window of the president’s office. That window bled light from the inside, where the glass had been shattered. What had Sonny been shooting at, when they’d heard the discharge of his guns? Enraged Grangers? Had they stormed the Residence, bent on vengeance?

  She crept into the cockpit, found her hand-comp on the floor, switched on the viewscreen. The news reports were garbled, but none of them showed the truly hair-raising sight of the Presidential Residence going up in flames. She narrowed her eyes. Somebody was censoring the news. On a really big scale. Why? There were no aircars visible anywhere in Madison’s skies. Not even news crews with aerial cameras.

  POPPA censorship had never been used for humanitarian reasons, so their goal couldn’t be an attempt to defuse the anti-Granger violence bound to erupt in the wake of a riot this big. Why, then? Her eyes widened as the implications hit home. Something had happened to the president. Maybe the vice president, as well. “My God,” she whispered, crouched on the bottom of her aircar’s cockpit. “They’ll spark a witch-hunt. The mobs will turn the Adero farms into slaughterhouses.” They’d kill anybody who looked even faintly like a Granger. She had to get Yalena out. Now.

  How?

  Mind spinning, she tried to think what to do, how to get herself and a shell-shocked adolescent girl out of a killing ground that the government had blockaded and would lock down so tightly, not even a rat would be able to wriggle its way through. She could call for help, but the nearest help was in Klameth Canyon. By the time anyone could reach them, somebody would have thought to ground air traffic planet-wide, controlling movement by potential “enemies of the people.”

  They couldn’t get out through the streets. They had to go either up or down. Up was not possible. That left down as the only viable option. The sewers presented themselves as an attractive alternative. Kafari narrowed her eyes. If they could crawl through the sewers, come up a few streets away… Coming up would be a problem, with Madison set to explode. The civilian emergency shelters would be more sanitary, if they were close to any. Downtown Madison was supposed to be riddled with below-ground shelters, in case of renewed attack by the Deng.

  She keyed her hand-comp to access the datanet and found an emergency evacuation map. There wasn’t a shelter anywhere near the dance club. Not close enough to gain it without going out into the streets. Scratch that idea. It was the sewers or nothing. Kafari moved across the roof at a low crawl, easing her way gingerly so she didn’t skyline herself. She slid herself to the back of the dance club, which overlooked an alley through which delivery trucks brought in supplies for the restaurant and dance club. There were dumpsters for refuse and a couple of groundcars parked near the service exit. The building behind the dance club was taller, a three-story structure that apparently housed tri-d screens stacked vertically, to conserve expensive downtown real-estate.

  Between the two buildings, Kafari spotted a tell-tale metal circle embedded in the pavement, providing access for sewer-system maintenance techs. All they had to do was reach the alley, pry up the cover, climb down, and pull the lid back on top of themselves. And at the moment, nobody was in sight to notice them doing it. Kafari peered over the edge of the dance club’s roof, trying to see if there might be a way down from here. She spotted a fire escape farther along, allowing rapid exit through one of the dance hall’s windows. That ought to serve nicely. Kafari rolled back from the edge, crawled across the roof, then skinned her way down the stairs and found Yalena waiting for her.

  “The Presidential Residence is burning. There’s no report of it anywhere, no aerial news crews, not even a peep on the datachats. I think Gifre Zeloc’s been killed and a news blackout’s been ordered.”

  Yalena gasped. Then once again, she demonstrated her father’s cool level-headedness under fire. “They’ll blame Grangers. Won’t they? We have to get out of Madison. And…” She bit one lip, then said it anyway. “And we have to warn people, somehow. On the farms.” She swallowed, realizing how that sounded, coming from her, then she lifted her chin in defiance and said, “Well, we do. Especially the Adero farms.”

  Kafari reached out and touched her daughter’s tear-stained cheek, smeared with makeup and dirt and horror. This stubborn, brainwashed child had just slashed through fifteen years of indoctrination, had finally realized that people she had considered “the enemy” all her life were about to be slaughtered without mercy. “Yalena,” she said, reaching back acros
s the years to a memory very precious to her, “I am proud to be your mama.”

  Yalena started to cry, gulped the sound back, tried to stiffen her shoulders.

  In that moment, Kafari knew they would be all right. If they could survive.

  Chapter Twenty

  I

  I return to my maintenance depot covered once again in misery, broken power cables, and dangling traffic signals. My mechanic is glued to a datascreen, watching the spectacle of Madison burn. When he hears me approaching, Phil runs out and greets me with an exhuberance I find puzzling, given the sudden death of Jefferson’s president.

  “Hooeee! You really kicked some ass, big guy! Wow, how many a’them land hogs didja run over and shoot? About a thousand of ’em, at least! I’m so freakin’ jealous, man, I can’t even stand it, ’cause I hadda watch on the screen, stead’a bein’ there, while you was right in the middle of it.”

  I come to a complete halt outside my maintentance bay, at a total loss for words. I have come to expect ruthless disregard for human life from the enemy, since species like the Quern, Deng, and Melconians operate under a belief system that does not include coexistence with another sentient, let alone space-faring, species. But not even fifteen years of monitoring POPPA leaders and their inflammatory rhetoric has prepared me for such an outburst from an individual who, so far as I have been able to determine, has never met — much less suffered abuse at the hands of — a Granger. I literally do not know how to respond to his glee.

  He grins up at my nearest external sensor array. “So, how’d it feel, finally gettin’ to show them land hogs what they got comin’ to ’em? Betch’a ain’t seen anythin’ like that, ever, have you?”

  Phil’s questions give me the referents I need to frame a response.

  “I am a Bolo Mark XX. Clearly, you do not understand what it means to be a Bolo. I am part of an unbroken lineage of humanity’s defenders, a lineage that stretches back nine-hundred sixty-one years. I am programmed to defend humanity’s inhabited worlds from harm. I have seen active service for one hundred fifteen point three-six years. During that time I have fought in three major wars, beginning with the Deng War of one-hundred fifteen years ago. I fought a new threat during the Quern Wars and was seriously damaged in the battle for Herdon III, where my Commander was killed. I have fought three campaigns in the current Deng War, which now engulfs thirty-seven human star systems.