The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  The mixed-up genders were irrelevant.

  Simon just nodded.

  “Kafari isn’t dead?”

  He shook his head. “Not… yet.”

  Ragged emotions tore across her face, like lightning snarling through a black thundercloud — or the smoke of battle. “Kafari Khrustinova saved the best man this ball a’ mud ever produced. And that piece of dogshit,” she jabbed a finger at the viewscreen, silent because someone had killed the sound, “just ordered her death, didn’t he?”

  Simon nodded again.

  The look in Maria’s eyes scared him. “We got work to do,” she said. Her eyes tracked toward the viewscreen, where Vittori stood gloating.

  “Oh, yes,” Simon said softly, “we certainly do.” He met and held the gaze of every person in the room, silently taking their measure and liking what he saw. The eerie sense of deja vu that crept across him left Simon with crawling chills along his nerves. Once, long ago, Simon had sat in conference with a group of this world’s people, preparing to fight a different war of survival. Memory of looking at each of them, measuring them against the coming conflict, and liking what he saw brought an ache to his heart that caught him totally off-guard. The people of this world deserved something better than Vittori Santorini and the butchers he had used to consolidate his power.

  The ache in his heart turned to flintsteel.

  The Deng, alien and incomprehensible, were at least an enemy a man could respect. Vittori Santorini and his army… “All right,” he said, “we’re through planning for this little war. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

  III

  I have been ordered into combat. The dismay that spreads through my entire neural network is so keen, I experience a psychotronic stutter. I need to convey an entire list of urgent reasons explaining why this order is seriously flawed. My cognitive focus, however, scatters itself into a thousand separate threads of thought: reasons, arguments, and warnings that need to be presented. I am literally unable to think of a single, cogent argument that would persuade Vittori Santorini to wait until I have been fully repaired. He is not willing to wait — not even another hour. My treads have been repaired and my guns are operational. That is all that matters to President Santorini.

  My duty is clear, even if nothing else is: I will carry out the president’s orders to the best of my limited and failing ability. I am a flawed tool crawling blindly into a suicidal mission against an enemy that has demonstrated its tenacity in trying to destroy me. But I will continue as long as there is power in my electronic synapses. It is my duty to destroy the Eenemy or be destroyed by it. Their mission and mine are the same. We differ only in capability.

  I cannot see my Enemy.

  They can see my thirteen-thousand-ton warhull distressingly well.

  I direct my heavy lifter to carry me across the Adero floodplain, toward Maze Gap. There is no movement anywhere on the floodplain. No air traffic. No ground traffic. Just empty fields to either side of the Adero River and the road that parallels it.

  My destination lies fifty kilometers ahead. The Damisi Mountains are a nightmarish place to do battle. The Deng did not have time to prepare fortified emplacements, when they seized Klameth Canyon. They barely had time to offload their ships before I was among them, wreaking havoc. The commodore’s guerillas have been digging in and hunkering down for an entire week. I am not anxious to experience the logical result of that advance preparation.

  I progress slowly. The heavy lifter carrying me is capable of reaching orbital velocity, but the main thrusters point down, rather than laterally, and this configuration cannot be changed. This is an old lifter — far older than I am — without the variable-mount thrusters of modern lifters. Horizontal cross-country speeds, therefore, are a minuscule fraction of vertical speed. I am restricted to a paltry hundred kilometers an hour, which means I face a thirty-minute transit just to reach the battlefield.

  I have been airborne only four minutes, thirteen seconds when Vittori Santorini interrupts programming on all military and civilian communications frequencies for an unscheduled broadcast. He stands at the podium in the Presidential Palace’s own news studio, a bunker of a room under the palace, which is the only place Vittori Santorini will consent to give a televised press conference or interview. Notoriety has its price. Vittori has good reason for his paranoia.

  His speech begins softly. They usually do. It’s where they end that matters, since they almost inevitably provoke destructive violence. I am exceedingly suspicious of President Santorini’s motives, but the serious nature of this broadcast is unmistakable, underscored by the furrows of stress and harsh weariness in his face.

  It is odd, to be able to “see” Vittori’s broadcast clearly. The visual images are transmitted directly to my data processors. I cannot see through my own sensors at all. The sensation is disorienting, but it is a surprising relief to “see” something besides blobs of IR color without definition or detail.

  I pay abrupt attention to Vittori Santorini’s speech when he mentions me.

  “Even now,” Vittori says, “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 destruction those criminals have visited on us for so many years. I pledge to you here and now, this war will end now. Tonight. The time for mercy to our common enemy is long past. Our patience is at an end. We must act decisively, now, this very night.

  “And that, my dearest friends, is what we have done, what we are doing, even as we speak. Thirty-two minutes ago, we launched an attack to wipe out the vast bulk of the rebel army. Our Bolo will launch other attacks. He will fight for our survival. He will strike every terrorist camp, every refuge where these evil criminals seek to hide from justice. He will attack them tonight, tomorrow, every day without letup, for as long as it takes to destroy each and every filthy terrorist on our lovely world. We will no longer tolerate any threat!

  “But it is not enough to hunt them down. Not enough to poison the land that feeds them. They have spread their filthy cult across the stars. We cannot look up at night, without seeing other innocent worlds they have blighted. We cannot enjoy the beauty of a clear summer night without remembering the evil they have wrought.

  “We must track them down and destroy them everywhere they have gone! They have fled to Mali and Vishnu. Any off-world government that dares to harbor these mad criminals will be treated as contemptible enemies. We will destroy anyone and everyone opposing our mandate to rid human space of this scourge. They have fled to Mali, to Vishnu. We will track them with our Bolo! We will follow them to Mali and blow them out of the domes, out into Mali’s methane hell. We will track them to Vishnu. We will hunt down their protectors in the Ngara system’s government. It is our sacred duty! We will not fail!”

  He leans forward, mouth nearly touching the microphone, and lets go a sibilant hiss, like a maddened cobra: “We will have revenge!”

  The knife-edged snarl reverberates across the airways and through the datachats into every home and office on Jefferson. The entire assembly in the Joint Chamber gasps. Vittori digs into the podium with fingers like claws, biting the wood in a frenzy. “Yes, revenge, my friends! That is what this wild and violent night will bring us! We will take revenge for our murdered innocents. We will take revenge for the slaughter of our brave police officers. For our judges, our elected officials, our murdered teachers and professors. These terrorists owe a debt of blood so high, the cost cannot even be reckoned. But the bill has come due, my friends. The bill has come due and it is high time they paid it!”

  The president’s expression is exalted. His eyes blaze. He flings both arms wide and shouts, “Blood demands blood! We will spill theirs until there is no blood left! This one last push will end the menace of Grangerism on our world. We will rip it out by the roots. We will chop off its head and destroy the entire command structure. Grangerism dies tonight! And when that threat is gone, t
he world will be safe to implement the last of our beautiful reforms. We have worked and waited for this moment, this chance, for twenty years. The chance, the moment is now.

  “There will finally be peace and prosperity for all. Everyone will do good work and no one will ever suffer from wants or shortages. Oh, the lovely world we will build! The envy of every star system humanity has ever colonized. Our names will be remembered for a thousand years, as the people who built paradise out of a war-torn wreck…”

  I had not realized until this moment that Vittori Santorini is a radical utopian. He really believes it is possible to make the world “perfect.” Men like Sar Gremian sign on for the power and prestige membership will bring them. Others join for purely monetary reasons. But Vittori really believes the web of lies and intractable, unworkable utopian fallacies that pass for laws and civic policies on this world.

  Commercial broadcast stations, preempted by the speech, have begun to air split-screen footage, showing Vittori’s broadcast studio in the Presidential Palace and the Joint Chamber between Jefferson’s Senate and House of Law. An estimated half of Jefferson’s senators and assemblymen have gathered in the Joint Chamber to listen to Vittori’s speech.

  “This is the task we face, my friends. These are the challenges. There is only one way to begin. Only one sure way to guarantee that we will have the peace and prosperity necessary to begin our sacred task…”

  Vittori is still speaking when I receive a communique from Sar Gremian.

  “Bolo.”

  The familiar grating voice jolts me back into full awareness of my surroundings.

  “Unit SOL-0045, reporting.”

  “Aren’t you there, yet?”

  “ETA twelve minutes, eleven seconds.”

  “Speed the hell up, willya?” I detect stress in Sar Gremian’s voice.

  “I am cruising at maximum horizontal thrust.”

  “Why don’t you turn it up on its side and use the main thrusters? You could get there in seconds.”

  “The cleats mating my warhull to this lifting platform will not hold thirteen thousand tons of flintsteel and munitions in that attitude. They are designed keep me from shifting during vertical combat drops and recalls, not to weld me to the platform.”

  “Well, dammit, get there as fast as you can! We’ve got trouble heating up and I’ve got to forestall it — fast. The best way to do that is to destroy the beast at the head. That’s your job. My job is to make sure the decapitated snake doesn’t turn around and crush us to death.”

  I detect strain in his voice. I do not know what has put it there. I suspect a connection between Sar Gremian’s foul mood and the actions of Madison’s urban guerilla fighters, but I have no way of verifying that and Jefferson’s Supreme Commandant of Internal Security signs off without enlightening me. He is clearly unsatisfied, but there is nothing I can do to alter the laws of physics. I am only a Bolo. I leave miracles to my creators — and the gods they worship.

  The bright sunshine of afternoon is already fading into twilight by the time I am halfway across the Adero floodplain. The Damisi mountain slopes are a confusing jumble that my IR sensors cannot adequately translate. Ghostly patches of heat and puddles of cooler shadow distort the rocky walls of a refuge that has sheltered a rebel army for four years, creating a hodgepodge vista too confusing to be of any practical use. I pull visuals from my experience databanks, trying to compare the IR ghosts I see now with the terrain features I recorded during the battle to liberate Klameth Canyon from the Deng. This helps. It is not as reliable as being able to see real-time images in all spectra, but it helps.

  Flashes of light, flaring and streaking skyward from the vicinity of Maze Gap, indicate a major artillery barrage underway, one which has evidently been raging for several minutes. I gain altitude, trying to focus my failing visual sensors on the distant battlefield. Long, crawling lines of light on the ground reveal themselves as brushfires burning on the Adero floodplain, where vegetation has caught fire from exploding munitions. Federal batteries fire through the Gap, trying to hit gun emplacements.

  The tactic is suicidal. Literally. Rebel gunners, sheltered by the high cliffs on either side of the gap, return direct fire with deadly, pin-point accuracy. Federal troops, fighting from hastily dug positions on the open floodplain, suffer terrific damage under blistering rebel fire. Explosions in the federal camp mark the spectacular demise of siege guns and their crews. I count six major batteries firing on the Gap, alone, with another eight batteries pumping out volley after volley from long-range mortars. The shells rise in spectacular, high parabolas. Federal gunners are literally shooting over the mountain peaks, dropping a deadly rain of live munitions into Klameth Canyon.

  It takes only seconds to assimilate what is happening at the Gap. The thing that rivets my attention, however, is not the barrage itself. It is the confusing blur of motion inside and around the sprawling federal encampment. Hotspots flare brightly against the cooler, darker ambient background. My first impression proves itself inaccurate within seconds. Rebel gunners have not dropped a cluster bomb or even something as simple as napalm, setting the camp ablaze.

  The hotspots are not fires. They are moving, rushing, in fact, at a high rate of speed. They are engine emissions from military vehicles headed away from the Gap. The ones farthest from it are moving the fastest, suggesting longer travel time, during which they have built up highway speed. What I see is so unexpected, it takes an astonishing seven point three-nine seconds to believe the evidence of my failing sensors.

  The troops at Maze Gap are falling back. Retreating from the battlefield. Running away so rapidly, the exodus has all the hallmarks of a panic-stricken retreat. I expect to see a corresponding movement of Granger troops in the Gap, rushing forward in hot pursuit. But this pursuit does not materialize. The only movement visible anywhere in Maze Gap is the supersonic streak of artillery shells. Federal gun crews continue to fire aggressively, laying down a blistering barrage while the bulk of the troops evacuate. Neither the retreat nor the barrage make sense. I am on the way to break the blockade. Why would the federal gun crews risk the withering return fire of rebel gunners, when they could simply wait half an hour and turn the job over to me?

  The retreat makes even less sense. Once I arrive, my guns will guarantee iron-clad safety for the troops camped on the Adero floodplain. Not only will I shoot down any rounds fired at them by rebel gunners, I will destroy the gunners and their weapons, permanently eliminating the threat they represent. Despite my best efforts, I cannot cobble together a rational explanation for a sudden, all-encompassing retreat of federal troops who are literally on the edge of total victory.

  I attempt to contact Sar Gremian to request an updated VSR, but am unable to raise him. The situation is sufficiently disquieting to nudge me from Alert Standby status to Battle Reflex Alert, ready to fire at an instant’s notice, even though I am not yet close enough to the combat zone to trip the automatic reflex alert of an actual firefight. I continue to request VSR and continue to be met with nothing but silence. Federal troops continue to fall back, retreating a full ten kilometers from Maze Gap. The only federals remaining in the siege camp are the gun crews working the artillery batteries. The steady barrage has given way to a new pattern. Gun crews fire in short bursts, concentrating two-thirds of their fire on the far end of Klameth Canyon, where the deep gorge dead-ends against the Klameth Canyon Dam. The remaining bursts scatter across the maze of side canyons in a thorough dispersal pattern that appears to be totally unopposed, now. This, too, disquiets me. Rebel gunners are too skilled to miss easy shots and too desperate to simply give up.

  My lifter finally reaches the rear lines of Jefferson’s federal troops, which are fleeing down every road leading away from the Gap. I hear the familiar deep thunder of field artillery firing on enemy emplacements, each rolling boom followed by the whistle and crack of artillery shells leaving gun barrels at supersonic speed.

  I cannot decipher topographical featu
res with any certainty. Distressingly, my vision systems progressively weaken, until I have lost short IR, leaving nothing but medium IR to decipher my surroundings. Rock faces show as blinding glares, with trees and houses flickering past as mere ghosts that I can barely identify.

  I finally receive another radio transmission from Sar Gremian. “Bolo, are you there, yet?”

  “I have just arrived.”

  “Good. Land that thing and get ready to clear the minefield in Maze Gap. I’m issuing orders to my gunners to fall back with the rest of our troops.”

  “Why was a retreat ordered?”

  “So I wouldn’t lose the only goddamned army I’ve got left,” he snarls. “Haul your carcass off that lifter and get to work!”

  I settle to the ground and disengage cleats. The artillery barrage breaks off abruptly. The last echoes crack and fade to silence, bouncing off the high, snow-capped peaks to vanish into the distance. Gun crews run for vehicles and join the rest of the federal forces to complete the pull-out. I am alone, again, facing a deadly enemy and a grim, difficult task. It would be less lonely, if I had a commander…

  I will not think of Simon.

  I dismount from my transport and rumble cautiously towards the battle lines thrown across Maze Gap. My electronic misery is compounded as several of my weapons systems begin to report catastrophic failures. Jittery, ghosting flickers cause systems to drop off-line, surge back to operational status momentarily, then drop off-line again, in a random pattern that leaves me unable to predict which weapons systems will function at any given moment in the upcoming battle. This is nearly cause for despair.

  But I am a unit of the Dinochrome Brigade. No Bolo has ever failed to do his or her duty when he or she had one erg of power left. Not one of us has ever been defeated save through crippling battle damage or outright destruction. I come to a halt just in front of Maze Gap and face the Enemy head-on. What comes will come. I must carry out my mission to the best of my ability. And that mission must begin by clearing Maze Gap.