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, the 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.