The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  The remainder of Alpha Team waded in, pulling corpses off the mound. Kafari’s gut kept clenching with dread. They were near the bottom when one of the bodies in the pile moaned and stirred. Kafari’s hair stood on end for a split second, then she and Dinny rushed forward, pulling the woman free of the corpses stacked on top of her. An agonized sound burst from Dinny’s throat. Aisha was still alive. But not for long. Kafari could see that, at first glance. Dinny dropped to his knees beside her, cradling her head and trying to lift her from the floor where they’d dumped her to die. “I’m here, Mama,” he told her, voice choked down to a raw whisper. “I’ve got you safe now.”

  “Dinny?” she whispered. “You got away…”

  “We’re going home, Mama,” he told her, voice breaking. “We’re taking you home.”

  “Don’t need to go home, son,” she said, her voice shockingly fragile. “Just get me outside these walls, outside them fences. I want to die free.”

  Anguish tore gashes into Dinny’s battered face. Then the fire team finally unblocked the door and pulled it open.

  “We’ve got live kids in here!”

  Kafari’s breath sobbed in her lungs with a single, heartfelt prayer of relief.

  “Get ’em out! I want this building cleared in the next three minutes!”

  Children started tumbling out of the room, tripping over bodies that had once been people they loved. Glass-pale, they greeted their rescuers with eyes like burnt cinders. They went where they were told to go. Older ones helped younger ones. Once-innocent faces were etched with the cruelty they had witnessed.

  Kafari turned her attention back to Aisha. “Get her downstairs,” she told the remaining two members of Alpha Team. “Put her in my truck. Shove that bastard commandant into another one. I won’t have them in the same space. Tell Anish to interrogate the son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  They lifted Aisha while Dinny braced her head, then maneuvered her to the stairs. Kafari turned on her heel and strode back to where Red Wolf was holding six butchers at gunpoint. Kafari stared at the six women for long moments. “How many of you are constitutional scholars?”

  The prisoners glanced at one another.

  “No one?” Kafari prompted. “All right. Let me acquaint you with the contents of clause twenty-three. ‘Each citizen has the legal duty and moral responsibility to protect Jefferson from all threats, foreign or domestic. Any government official acting in abrogation of this constitution represents a threat to Jefferson’s survival and must not be tolerated. If redress in the courts fails to curb usurpation of power, citizens are authorized and required to remove such officials from office.’ I think that just about says it all, don’t you?”

  The six women who had participated in the torture and slaughter of innocent prisoners stared up at her. Realization dawned in their eyes. Kafari allowed them sufficient time to know terror.

  “Consider yourselves officially removed.”

  She left them sitting on the floor, meeting Red Wolf’s glance on her way past. Kafari was halfway down the stairs when the first shot ripped loose. Screams erupted, high and knife-edged, begging for the mercy they had failed to show their victims.

  Five more rapid-fire shots silenced them.

  Kafari strode toward her truck, barking out orders. “Do a final sweep and mount up. Give me a by-the-squad headcount in two minutes. I want everyone outside this base in three minutes. Move it!”

  Squads reported in. The last members of Alpha and Beta’s fire teams emerged from a final, visual sweep, making sure they’d found all the prisoners. Two minutes and twelve seconds later, they were in their trucks, heading for the holes they’d made in Nineveh’s fences. Not one shot was fired at them. Nineveh’s survivors had no further stomach for it. Once clear, the trucks scattered into the predawn darkness, heading across the Adero floodplain for a host of hiding places she and Anish had worked out. Kafari drove only as far as the nearest Hellbore gunnery crew and halted. She left the engine idling and slid down to greet the crew.

  “We’re prepped and ready to go, sir.”

  The other two Hellbore crews reported readiness, as well. “Very good,” Kafari said. “On my signal.”

  She pulled off her command helmet and strode to the back of the truck, where Aisha Ghimal lay cradled in Dinny’s lap. She climbed up, swung the rear doors closed, then switched on the light. Aisha blinked up at Kafari.

  “Honey child,” she whispered, “it was you…”

  She dropped to her knees beside the dying woman. “Yes,” she choked out. “It was me.”

  Aisha groped for her hand. Kafari took it in a gentle grip, held on with careful strength, hating the glove of her biochem suit, which prevented her from touching her friend’s hand skin-to-skin. “You saved us, once before,” Aisha said, voice labored and weak, worse, even, than it had been in the charnel-house where they’d found her. “Killed off a whole army of Deng, to save us. You got… a different army to kill… this time.”

  “Yes,” Kafari said, unable to force anything more past the tight pain in her throat.

  “You’ll do it, child. You’ll save us. Ain’t nobody else who can do it. You got the heart for it, child, the heart and the head. And the wisdom.” Her fingers tightened against Kafari’s. Then she moved her head, slightly. “Dinny?” she whispered.

  “I’m here, Mama.”

  “You watch over Kafari, son. Help her do what’s got to be done.”

  “I will,” he swore the vow. “I swear it on Papa’s memory, I will.”

  “Love you, Dinny,” she breathed out, the words almost silent. “So proud to be your mama.”

  Her eyes didn’t close.

  But she wasn’t there, any more.

  Dinny started to cry, broken sobs that shook his shoulders with their violence.

  Kafari squeezed his shoulder once. Then opened the rear doors, dry-eyed and full of cold hatred. She closed the doors again. Retrieved the starlight scope from the cab of her truck. Moved purposefully to the waiting gunnery crew. Scanned Nineveh Base, which was a smouldering patch of light on the horizon.

  “You know what I want,” she said, her words striking the air like bitten-off chunks of steel. She pulled her helmet back on, which shielded her ears. She signaled the other two gun crews and said, “This is Alpha One. Stand by to fire.”

  She stood there one moment longer, staring across the intervening darkness, weighing risks and odds and the value of lessons about to be imparted. Then she climbed into her truck, gripped the wheel in both hands, and spoke again. “Now!”

  The night turned to fire. Nineveh Base’s motorpool and airfield erupted with volcanic fury. Fuel ignited, burning hot enough to melt steel. The Hellbores spoke again, with tongues of flame, The prison became a funeral pyre, cremating the dead and sending a message POPPA’s leaders would not soon forget. That lesson turned expensive when all three Hellbores snarled simultaneously, striking their final target for the night in perfect unison. Located on the corner of Ninevah Base farthest from the Shantytown, Sonny’s maintenance depot was an immense structure full of high-tech military munitions and sophisticated equipment necessary to repair the Bolo.

  It blew apart under Kafari’s guns. Hellbore fire hit the depot again and again, turning it into a white hell of destruction.

  The munitions inside detonated. The fireball flattened the home she had shared with Simon. The shockwave slammed into the rest of Nineveh Base like a scythe. Every building on the sprawling base vanished. The blast tore across the Adero floodplain, as well, heading right toward them. It shook Kafari’s truck so hard, glass shattered and they nearly flipped over. The truck rocked onto its rear wheels like bucking stallion, then the cab came down again and they landed with a jarring of bone and a shuddering of springs. Red Wolf recovered his senses first and started slapping broken glass off Kafari’s clothes.

  When she could see, again, Nineveh Base was gone.

  Just… gone.

  “That,” R
ed Wolf swore eloquently, “was one hell of a boom.”

  “That,” Kafari countered savagely, “was just the beginning.”

  She gave the signal to scatter. Then put the truck into gear, turned her back on the smouldering ruins, and drove away. They’d won the first battle. The rest of the war was going to get ugly.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I

  Movement woke Yalena with a clang and a jolt that made her gasp. It was dark, so dark she couldn’t see anything, and cold enough to hurt her skin, where she was sprawled across something lumpy and cold. “Mom? Are we in the cargo box?”

  No one answered. Yalena groped through the darkness, trying to find her mother’s hand. Her seeking fingertips encountered nothing but more of the ice-cold lumps she was lying on. Panic set in. “Mom!”

  Her wrist-comm beeped softly.

  “Sugarplum?”

  “Mom! Where are you?”

  “That’s not important. But I do need to tell you something that is. I can’t go with you. There are some things I have to do. Or try, anyway. Tell your father I love him…”

  “Mommy! You can’t do this! You have to come with me!”

  “I can’t, sweetheart. And we can’t talk like this, on an open comm-line. I love you. Remember that, always, whatever happens. I’ll get a message to someone, to let you out of there, okay?”

  “Mommy!” Yalena was groping, blind and terrified, for the side of the cargo box, where the door opened, and discovered there was no way to open it from the inside. Her breath caught in a painful knot. Her mother couldn’t come with her, because there wasn’t a way to latch the door properly from the inside. Somebody had to latch it from outside. She was neatly trapped. Her mother must have realized that all along.

  She was also on her way to the space station, with no way out. Yalena started to cry as the box swayed into the air. They tilted and swung around as stevedores transferred the cargo box to a waiting freight shuttle that would take her into orbit. They jolted, slid, clanged to a halt. Then waited. Interminably. Yalena was shivering with cold, miserable and scared. Then a rumble vibrated through the boxes. She finally identified the sound: orbit-capable engines coming on-line.

  A moment later, the shuttle lifted ponderously, swinging around with a spin that left her inner ears protesting. Then a giant fist crushed her down against the frozen meat. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe. It went on forever, an agony in every muscle…

  The engines cut off and she was abruptly weightless. Spinning nausea bit her throat. She was falling, could feel herself falling. Yalena tried to convince her inner ear that she was just weightless, in orbit, but her inner ear wasn’t having any of it. She threw up, creating a mess that drifted unpleasantly through the narrow space into which her mother had crammed her. Let me down! her body was screaming. That sounded like a very good idea to Yalena. Weight returned for a few seconds as the shuttle punched its engines in a short burst. The pilot was probably jockeying them around to dock with the station.

  How much time passed, Yalena didn’t know. There were more bursts from the shuttle’s engines. Then a clanging sound rang through the hull and abruptly Yalena dropped against the frozen meat. They’d made spacedock with the rotating station and the centrifugal spin gave her weight, again. She had no idea where, exactly, she was. Yalena knew that cargo shuttles never off-loaded directly into the freighters. They docked with the station and transferred cargo through Ziva Two, to give inspectors the opportunity to search for contraband.

  Would they check Yalena’s box? Her mother didn’t think so and the more Yalena thought about it, the more convinced she became that nobody would open this box to inspect it. With this much contraband going out, the station’s team of inspectors had to be aware of it. And were doubtless well paid in exchange for keeping their mouths shut while the modified boxes flowed through unchallenged.

  The cargo box shifted, jolting and bumping its way out of the shuttle’s cargo bay and into the station. Then they started sliding forward at a steady pace, riding on what must’ve been a conveyor belt of some kind while running the gauntlet of “random” inspections. They stopped several times, but nobody opened her box. They bumped their way off the conveyor and moved in a new direction. Another conveyor, Yalena realized. It was a long trip, moving as slowly as they were. At length, they were jolted and tipped and ended up stationary with a clang and a bump.

  Unless she were vastly mistaken, she had reached the freighter’s hold.

  There were other jarring bumps as more cargo boxes were stuffed in. Yalena started to panic. They were going to bury her at the back of the hold, with so much stacked over and around her, she’d be trapped and die of starvation, or maybe just from the bitter cold. There was a abrupt cessation of sound as the loading stopped. Yalena caught her breath, tried to hear through the muffling walls.

  A sudden grating noise assailed her ears. Then a sharp crack sounded as the door to her prison was thrown abruptly open. Light stabbed into the cramped space, blinding her. Someone exclaimed aloud, then hands reached in, pulling her out of the freezing cargo box. She was so cold and so cramped from lying there, she couldn’t stand up. She was picked up and carried. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized a man was holding her, a man who looked strangely familiar, although she was fairly certain she’d never seen him, before.

  He was staring at her, brows knit in puzzlement. “You don’t know me, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m Stefano Soteris, supercargo on The Star of Mali. Your mother,” he added with a slight smile, “is my cousin.”

  Yalena’s eyes widened. “You’re her cousin?”

  “That I am. And your second cousin. It’s lucky for you that we docked when we did.”

  Yalena didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t known her mother’s cousin worked on a Malinese freighter. Then guilt smote her squarely between the eyes. She hadn’t known, because she hadn’t ever shown the slightest interest in her own family. She didn’t even know how many cousins she had, let alone second cousins. Her ignorance was her own fault and no one else’s.

  “I’m sorry to be such trouble,” she whispered. “I’ve been nothing but nasty to everybody. Stupid and hideous and now… now people are risking themselves for me… and I’m not worth it…”

  Once she started crying, she couldn’t stop. Literally could not stop. Her mother’s cousin picked up speed, striding rapidly through the ship while she sobbed on his shoulder. She heard voices, Stefano’s and a woman’s, then she was lowered to sit on what looked, vaguely, like the edge of somebody’s bed. Stefano’s hard shoulder was replaced by a softer one. Gentle arms came around her, held and rocked her.

  “Easy, child, shh…”

  When the body-wrenching sobs finally eased away, Yalena realized she was leaning against an older woman with a lot of grey in her short-cropped hair. She was dressed as a spacer, in a close-fitting body sleeve made of something supple. One whole shoulder was soaking wet.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “No need to apologize,” the woman said, peering into her eyes. “You’ve come through several kinds of hell in the last few hours. I’d say you’ve earned a good, long cry. You need a good bit of sleep, as well. Your eyes are burnt out. And here’s the ship’s surgeon.”

  The doctor examined her with great care. “I’m giving you a sedative, young lady. A fairly strong one. We’ll do a bit more tomorrow, when you’re feeling up to it. For now, just rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again, unable to say anything else. He administered the sedative, gently, using a hypo-spray that barely stung at all. They left her alone, then, with nothing further to stand between her and her conscience. Facing herself was almost as bad as facing the Bolo had been. Every selfish, meanspirited, stupid thing she had ever done or said came back to rattle through her mind like swords on a whirligig. How could she ever make amends for the hurt she had caused her mother, over the years?


  Even worse was the prospect of facing her father. That was so daunting, Yalena would almost have preferred to jump out of the freighter by the nearest airlock. The memory of sitting in a hospital waiting room, insisting with childish selfishness that she wouldn’t leave Jefferson, when her father was desperately injured and would face a nightmare of rehabilitation alone, left her writhing inside, soul-sick and exhausted.

  How could she have demanded her own way at a time when her parents needed one another, desperately? All the laughter had gone out of her mother, that day, and it hadn’t returned in two long years. Yalena whimpered with the excruciating self-knowledge that she had spent those years twisting the knife deeper with every nasty comment, every belittling prejudice, every petty little demand she’d laid down as an ultimatum.

  A song from her childhood floated into her mind, a cheerful little song that danced in razor-sharp shoes. Growing oats and peas, barley and beans… farmers who did nothing but dance and sing and suck money away from decent people by charging outrageous prices for plants that grew themselves… A pretty, poisonous lie handed wholesale to a wounded, desperate child. Everything POPPA had said was a lie. The whole fabric of her life was a lie, a stained and tattered ruin that nothing would ever put right, again.

  Yet her mother had risked her own life, rescuing Yalena out of that deathtrap. Why? When she had spent her life preferring the company of her friends and the gossip at school over everything and everyone else? And now she didn’t even have those friends. POPPA had killed them. Coldly and without remorse. In that moment, a hatred of POPPA cyrstallized, so deep and so dangerous, it scared her.

  I can’t make it up to you, Mom, she whispered as the tears began to come, again. I can’t ever undo that damage. But I can stop being stupid and I can stop hurting people. And maybe one day… Yalena bit her lip and rolled over to bury her face in the pillow. Maybe one day, I can do something that will make you proud of me, instead. Then the weeping broke loose again and she soaked the pillow under her cheek. She was still crying when the sedative pulled her down into gentle oblivion.