This is the second posting in a serial novel. If you're a first time visitor, you might be better oriented by reading the Introduction from February 1's post. If you're returning, thank you. Thanks to everyone who sent me emails or commented on the first posting. Chapter One follows. If you enjoy what you read, please consider sharing the link with others.

 

Garrett Cold and the Freedom Keepers

Chapter One – The Whale

            I fell fifteen meters before the aged climbing rope, its elasticity long ago diminished from use, ended my fall, bruising my ribs and knocking the wind from me. I’d left a long zipper of carabineers up the side of the cliff and under the angled face of the ledge. When the rope went taut, the top two broke. The third held, but the piton it was attached to pulled free, bringing a rain of shattered granite and sand down with it. I might have cussed, but nobody was around to hear it. Nobody except the boss even knew I was here. And no one would be coming to rescue me.

            I’d let go of the radio and binoculars when I felt the blow that knocked me off the ledge. I felt certain the radio remained on top, just as certainly as I’d watched the binoculars fall with me until the rope interrupted my descent. The binoculars fell and I concentrated on the word perspective as the antique artifact, long past due for retirement yet still useful to me, all but disappeared before a cloud of dust around a black speck on the valley floor marked the point of impact. Seeing that, I did cuss, a long string of profanity muttered through clenched teeth as my aching sides resisted and surrendered to the conflicting forces of pain and the need to breathe.

            Have I been in worse scrapes? Sure, like the time Grampa sent me up a rock face to plant cylinders of homemade BLAST, an explosive concoction so unstable that the old man joked about avoiding butterflies. “One of them swallowtails lands too heavily on a cylinder and you’ll morph into something with wings too, boy.”

            “I thought you didn’t believe in angels, Grampa.”

            “I don’t. So be careful.”

            Careful didn’t include refusing to climb up to that long-ago ledge, just as it didn’t include refusing the sLOD boss’s order to climb to the present-day one, even if it had required that I go outside of Leaveton in the late hours of Freelife Seven’s long night, ascending an unfamiliar route lit only by the distant glow of the spaceport that spread like a titanic ice rink between the town and the western mountains of the Anglehorn Valley.

            Despite the darkness, I’d managed pretty well. There was only one bad moment, right at the end when a bubble of rock protruding out the angled bottom of the ledge forced me into a dyson move, swinging one-handed so that for an instant both of my feet hung in empty space until I could reach my leading hand over the edge of the narrow shelf that marked the apex of the climb. All the rest was what the space jocks call nominal.

            Every time I overcome the crux of a climb I think back to that day on my home world, the terra-formed planet Amos Albert Cold had retired to after more than forty Standard Years as a nano-tech engineer for TerraFirm – a sophisticated and huge corporation that took bare, uninhabitable rocks with the right combination of gravity, density, geography, and position in relation to the stars they orbited and forced them into a human habitable state. The home world, the one where I was born, the one whose name I’d never speak again, had been Grampa Cold’s last project. It was a complete workup, made to resemble an ancient version of humanity’s birthplace.

            Grampa wanted to reroute a creek that crossed his wind farm. BLASTing a rocky overhang at the top of a cliff would create just the right size pile of debris for what he had in mind. Always skeptical of Grampa’s methods, I grumbled for every meter of the climb. I ought to have been paying more attention to my surroundings than my feelings seeing as how I had thirteen ceramic cylinders filled with the touchy liquid in a pack on my back as I scaled the forty-meter-high cliff. Ten meters from the top I heard Grampa shout at the same time a small cascade of pebbles pattered down from overhead. Looking up, I saw hungry yellow eyes, and a mouth filled with long yellow teeth, accompanied by a growl that seemed to rumble and rise out of the very rocks I clung to. A full-grown cougar poised on the edge of the cliff, apparently contemplating lunch as its soon to be meal – meaning me – inched its way upwards. A complete workup in Terra-forming meant a fully self-sustainable world, and that meant introducing predators and prey of all kinds into the food chain.

            As I dangled above the Anglehorn Valley, remembering the cougar while I caught my breath on this half-formed planet, habitable only so long as the supply ships arrived on schedule, I wondered if the old man was still alive. The last time I saw him was at my sentencing, just hours before I was sold on the CONxchange and loaded onto the freighter that brought me to Freelife.  When the kinky spoke the fatal words, “Thou shalt be transported …” the old man had charged the courtroom rail, his face a block of flaming granite, a clenched fist and defiant finger pounding the air with sound and fury.

“S’long as you’re breathing, Garrett, you live all in. Do you hear me, boy? Live like your next breath is your last. You kindle that spark o’life until you’re all used up, and burn down anything that stands in the way o’that. It’s in your blood. Cold blood. Cold blood, Garrett, don’t you never forget it! Swear to me, boy. You swear to it! You’re a Cold. Don’t never forget that!” He’d kept on hollering as the bailiffs dragged him out, all the way down the hall and out the door, so long as he thought I could hear.

I like to think I’ve done as well as possible by Grampa, starting in the mines on Freelife Two as a demolition hand until the sLOD boss singled me out for a special duty.

“You’re too dangerous a man to leave in the mines, Garrett Cold,” was all the explanation I was ever given. One day a militia man handed me a radio, told me my new keeper wanted a word, and the next thing I knew I was on a shuttle to relatively EZ Time on Freelife Seven. Too dangerous for the mines? I didn’t understand any part of that. Perhaps the man had read my trial transcript, although that seemed like the sort of thing one did before purchasing a convict not two years later, unless something uncharacteristic occurred to bring said convict to his attention. I wrestled with this problem for longer than it was worth without finding even a reasonable hypothesis. In any case, the sLOD who arranged for my transfer also elevated my status from convict to Deputy Marshall, a flattering and senseless title that carried very little weight, but did gain me a few privileges – namely a set of ropes, pins, clips, and climbing shoes; use of a nitro-alcohol fueled scooter; a private cell in central Leaveton; and exemption from the rote life of most convicts – along with an interplanetary two-way radio keyed and locked on my end to the boss’s private frequency.

I’ve been told that such radios, with their ability to allow for communication at faster-than-light speeds allowing instantaneous transmission and response across hundreds of millions of kilometers of open space, could be illegally modified into the more powerful and tightly regulated interstellar variety, but to do so would probably get me reassigned to the mines and possibly caught in a zero-atmosphere environment without a pressure suit before too many days. Contraband dealers often met with such ‘accidents’ when they were caught. The militia hauled me out to the garrison HQ every few weeks just so they could verify that the radio hadn’t been tampered with.

            Still dangling above the western perimeter of the spaceport while the molasses dawn continued to spread increasingly scarlet-hued rays across the valley, I heard Grampa Cold’s words in my mind, “Nothing focuses the mind as clearly as the awareness of one’s imminent death.” Like most of Amos Cold’s axioms, this one, lifted from one of the aged volumes he’d collected over the decades of traveling about the galaxy, became a theory to be tested. The locus of Grampa’s child rearing practices involved teaching me a great appreciation for living by putting me in a series of life-threatening situations. Not that he didn’t first train and prepare me, but there was always an element of chance involved. Accidents, unexpected consequences, and the unpredictable nature of third parties in any given situation tweaked reality, sometimes in a dangerous and uncertain fashion.

            Grateful for my safety line, I took a long look over the Valley, expecting to see some pursuit of the fugitive and her accomplices being organized at the spaceport or the adjacent militia garrison. To my surprise, even the squads dispatched to the wedge-shaped starship after the escape seemed to be returning to their interrupted breakfast, morning drills, or sleep. After a few moments consideration I thought I understood how the land lay. Ella Cantor may have escaped the militia, but to what? Unless she had a large supply of food, water, and ultimately the means to get off the Freelife system and back to the softie worlds, she would eventually either be caught or die in the wasteland outside Leaveton.

            Mostly recovered, except for sore ribs, I took a moment to check the rigging before beginning the laborious task of climbing hand-over-hand up fifteen meters of loose rope. Perspective, I thought, changes not only with the location of the viewer but also the ground, or lack of it, on which the viewer stands. I’d climb a couple of meters and then loop the rope and rest, allowing the aching in my chest and back to subside a bit, all the while looking out on the Anglehorn sunrise.

The valley, a thirty kilometer long gash between two mountain ranges, seemed immense when standing on the ledge. Suspended in space, that immensity expanded so that in the early light, the valley walls all but disappeared and the labyrinthine wheel of Leaveton’s design glowed like a mythological medallion from some long dead and forgotten religion. Nine rings, bisected by four major roadways, divided the two kilometer diameter into eight pie wedges, each named after a point of Freelife Seven’s compass – Anger, Fraud, Gluttony, Greed, Heresy, Limbo, Lust, and Violence – and the central hub bearing a ninth moniker, Treachery. The designers’ sense of irony wasn’t lost on me. The Inferno, one of the oldest surviving texts in human history, was one of Grampa’s favorite late-night reads.

            Most of the century old town showed signs of maintenance and even replacement of buildings and roads. However, the north quarter, consisting of Lust and Violence, existed under a haze of green lights that remained on at all times, the original buildings of the mine offices, warehouses, and rail shanties held together by paint, blood, and the haunted screams of the inhabitants. When Freelife Zero at last crested the peaks across the valley, the photocells throughout the town, the garrison, and the spaceport winked and every light switched off, except in the northern quarter. It glowed like an infected organ that no medicine could heal.

With two meters to climb, I hung on for a few minutes more, drawing deep breaths of the ominously sweet morning air before shimmying up, setting my feet in the crevice, reaching with my left hand for a nub of rock and throwing my second dyson of the day. I nearly fell again when I stretched my right arm out as a sharp pain ran around my rib cage and down my spine. “All in, you son-of-a-bitch,” I said through gritted teeth as I felt the solid shelf of rock beneath my finger tips and clawed my way up, hoping that I was correct in my theory as to what had knocked me off in the first place.

 

            A Standard Hour later, having found the ledge empty as expected, retrieved my radio, and rappelled back down to the valley floor, I rode my scooter back to Leaveton, taking the long way around the spaceport, which by now would be a beehive of activity as militia men and women prepared to descend on the town for the SixKill Celebration. I had a lot to think about, and going a dozen clicks out of my way seemed more a help than an inconvenience. An old enemy, long repressed, had returned after eight years to torment me. Fortunately, I’d ended my conversation with the sLOD boss before falling. This enemy, a consequence of the crimes that sent me to the system in the first place, might make the boss second guess the trust he’d placed in me. I’d keep it to myself for the time being.

            The syrupy smell of the air only increased as Freelife Zero rose higher. I looked uneasily over at the spaceport where the grey-black hulk of the starship Ella Cantor arrived on dominated the low, metal hangars designed for light, interplanetary shuttlecraft. Starships generally didn’t operate in atmosphere because of the effects their ionized gas emissions have on local weather. I guessed we were in for severe electrical storms later in the day, especially if Freelife Zero acted up – the disturbing tendency red dwarf stars have to expel charged particles at fantastic velocities into the space around them far more frequently than the docile yellow ones favored by humankind. If that happened, and the odds were about even that it would, we’d all be spending SixKill Day in the sweltering underground tunnels with inadequate ventilation and light, and lots of hard surfaces where falls and fights turned from disagreeable to sometimes fatal, while killing radiation bombarded the exposed surfaces and any unfortunate living thing who didn’t go below in time. It was the closest thing to being in a mine that the planet offered.

            After circling the spaceport, I headed toward Leaveton on an unpaved path that would eventually connect with Heresy/Greed Road, and on to the second ring and my cell, actually a twenty-year-old, two-room flat above a fortune teller’s shop in Heresy. I wanted nothing more than to sleep, but as is often the case with me, I’d done too much thinking on the ride back so that I knew I’d spend any time in my rack staring at the blistered paint overhead while a thousand thoughts, most of them uncomfortable, churned inside me.

            I’d only seen Ella Cantor for a moment, wearing an oversized pair of prison coveralls that rendered her body mostly shapeless. But I knew a bit about her. The sLOD boss had briefed me, perhaps too well, before he sent me on my assignment.

            “She’s earned her reputation, Garrett, as the most dangerous woman alive.” The radio’s digi-screen came alive and I watched as a series of slides played across it while the boss talked. Most were pictures of Ella’s crime scenes, lifted from her trial transcript. It was illegal for a Freelife convict to see any of this. Part of our banishment involved a total blackout on all news from the softie worlds, and to tell you the truth, we preferred it that way after a while. When you’ve lost and left behind everything you ever knew, ever cared about, or ever wanted, seeing even fragments of it hurts so bad that you find yourself wishing the sLOD’s believed in the death penalty. I thought Ella Cantor, of all the bad people I’d ever known, might be the most deserving of it.

            The crime scenes looked more like battlefield photos, images of such bloody death and senseless destruction that I had trouble connecting them to any single person, let alone a woman who was said to be one of the most beautiful and charming ever born. Hyperbole abounds in softie newscasts, but the slideshow, even without the boss’s narration, defied exaggeration. If anything, words understated the depravity of Ella Cantor’s offenses against humanity. If those images made their way to the general convict population she’d be acclaimed queen of the city, or at least the northern quarter.

            “Why no pictures of …” I hesitated, as if speaking her name might have potentially dangerous consequences.

            “Of Ella? You know the answer, Garrett.”

            Of course I did, no pictures allowed of those erased from humanity’s roll, which is what happened to every Freelife convict as soon as their trials ended. It was the only legal way to sell us into servitude to the corporations that ran the mining operations of Freelife. Human slavery had been outlawed for centuries, so part of the legal decree of banishment included a declaration that we were no longer human beings, but chattel, and therefore subject to sale and ownership by corporate entities. Upon conviction, every trace of our existence was systematically removed from the softie data networks. Only the trial transcripts and evidence, given over to our new owners, remained to mark our passage among civilized humanity.

            When I finally saw her face, however briefly through my binoculars, it became even harder to connect the classic beauty of the petite blonde woman to the horrors of the slide show. Now, making my way past the quiet outer rings of Leaveton, long rows of cells where most of the permanent residents sleep, I realized that she was out in the wilderness of hell and I suddenly, inexplicably felt very protective of her. One of my responsibilities as Deputy Marshall is keeping track of those confined to the planet, seeing to it that when someone dies or disappears an investigation is conducted and a proper reporting given to my sLOD boss. He’s some sort of accountant for the corporations that run the enterprise. Convicts fall under the asset column.

            “Assets must be inventoried regularly, Garrett. How else do we know how much food to send you?” As to Ella Cantor’s position in the hierarchy of things, he’d ended his review of her life with this statement, “She’s as valuable a piece of merchandise as exists in the system. Valuable and very, very dangerous.

            “…report back to me only when she is safely in the orientation hanger,” the boss had said. I’d reported all that happened, but she wasn’t yet safely in the hanger and that meant I was still on assignment, even if the boss had diverted my attention to first finding out how Ella had engineered her escape. “Ella,” I said aloud, my voice disappearing in the roar of the scooter’s engine. Am I a sucker for pretty faces or had it just been so long since I’d seen one? The women of Freelife, as a rule, didn’t get here by way of beauty pageants.

            “Avoid any personal contact with her, Garrett. She’ll most likely ignore you if she notices you at all. But, she might kill you just for fun.”

            Somewhere deep inside me, Grampa chuckled at that. As I replayed it in my mind, I actually thought he’d had climbed on the scooter behind me and leaned in close to shout in my ear. “You hear that, boy? Time for another lesson, another rung up the ladder to really appreciating life. Time to go all in, you hear me, all in…or die trying. It’s in your blood. In your Cold blood.”

            “Ella Cantor, I’m going to find you,” I said aloud for Grampa’s benefit. I had enough difficulty without being haunted by the specter of Amos Albert Cold. I glanced back, expecting to see his stern, sun-weathered face glaring at me, as it had all through my trial and sentencing. But there was only the wind and the red sunshine of Freelife Seven as I turned into the second ring of Heresy. I really did want to find her, maybe even try to get her attention, see if she’d notice me. “Kiss me or kill me, but don’t ignore me,” I thought, practicing the first greeting that came to mind as I thought of her.

 

            Every wedge of Leaveton, with its sinful name, exists as a community of service. Miners earn a trip to the planet by productive work on the asteroids. When they arrive at the spaceport, not long after sunset, militia guards oversee a degrading process that prepares the guests for their day of rest and relaxation. Since a day on Freelife Seven is five Standard Days long and Standard Days govern the cycles of work shifts on the asteroids, there’s a bit of adjustment for the visiting convicts to make. The disorientation they feel is only heightened by being strip-searched, disinfected, and sent into town on crowded buses with nothing but a change of clothes and shoes. If it’s their first trip to Leaveton, they attend a briefing on environmental safety before being allowed on the bus. They need to know what to do if Freelife Zero decides to launch a few million tons of radioactive particles at the man-made atmosphere of the planet, and where to take shelter in the event an electrical storm arises. Being hit by sheet lightning out of a clear sky ruins a vacation faster than just about anything I can think of. Once the miners complete the entry procedures, they board buses that run down Limbo/Heresy from the spaceport, to the central hub of Treachery. From there, some immediately lose themselves in the busiest watering hole on the planet, a tavern with the friendly name of Bernie’s Roundhouse Punch. The rest hire rickshaw runners to haul them into the rings where the various venues of entertainment, all run by resident convicts, eagerly await the credit-rich miners arrival. At the end of their holiday, their credit accounts and bodies both exhausted, they reconvene in the hub, where the same buses wait to take them to waiting shuttles. A few don’t make it back. During SixKill, that number rises. Death is always a player in Freelife’s entertainments.

            Shuttles run daily for five local days. Every sixth day, those of us who live on Seven get a break. Sixty such cycles plus one local day make up the full three hundred sixty-five day Standard Year. That local day is SixKill. With a million convicts earning one or two leaves a year, Leaveton generally has twenty-thousand guests being serviced by forty-five hundred or so Sevens – we’re referred to collectively by our work base – watched over by a thousand person militia garrison. The official sLOD tally on any given day would be right at one thousand humans and twenty-four thousand, five hundred slaves. On SixKill Day, the militia commanders send in a surge of another five hundred troops in full riot gear, a not so subtle reminder of the implications of the holiday for anyone who might want to organize an uprising. Like the complete destruction of all life on Freelife Six would ever be forgotten. “Scorch the world and plow it under with salt so that nothing might ever again call her home,” is emblazoned on a massive mural, artist unknown, of the Freelife system at the entrance to the spaceport. Each of the asteroids and Freelife Seven are depicted in brilliant red, ochre, and yellow-hued nano-paints that shift to depict the rotation and orbit of each. Freelife Six remains fixed forever in non-reflective blackness so deep that it appears to be a hole to absolute nothingness on one side of the painting.

            To add to the intimidating atmosphere of the holiday, a second surge of two thousand militia troops arrive sometime in the night for a local day of leave. SixKill Day, some party.

            I rolled up to the metal staircase leading to my cell, parked the scooter underneath, and carrying my gear bag, climbed up the stairs, feeling the aches in my thirty-four year old bones with every jarring step. No one stays young for long on Freelife. Most doors in the town don’t have locks. Mine does – another gift from the sLOD boss, to keep his favorite pet convict from being murdered in bed. Some of the work I’ve done on his behalf has driven a wedge between me and the general population. As I reached the top of the stairs I saw the door to my cell standing open.

            “Digit?” I called the name of the person I assumed to be my visitor, before walking through the door. Digit emerged from the bath area a few seconds later. He’s ancient as convicts go, old enough to remember back thirty years to the original SixKill Day. He generally looks me up on the Holiday to make a report on the numbers situation in the town, hence his nickname. "Are you good for anything other than breaking and entering?"

            Like nearly everyone assigned to Freelife Seven, Digit is visibly unsuited for work in the mines. With his slight, short frame, cataracts, and crooked spine, he’d be broken to bits just from the vibrations of the rock hammers.

            “Garrett Cold, you missed breakfast at the main. It was particularly good today, we had freeze-dried protein reconstituted with grey water and served over a bed of molded grape leaves. There were some who didn’t want it and others who asked for seconds. All in all thirty-one percent decided that …”

            “Digit, I’m in a hurry. Give me the details later. How many cons? How many militia?” I threw my gear bag into a chest against one wall, snapping the lock shut in the hasp and turning my attention toward getting cleaned up. I had the beginnings of a plan for finding Ella Cantor’s whereabouts and didn’t want to be distracted by Digit’s monotonous repetition of the census numbers.

            “Twenty-four thousand, one hundred and fourteen at first light, G-g-garrett. And you m-missed you-your b-b-breakfast.”

            “You forget your medicine again, Dig? You know how inefficient your stuttering is. Do you need me to call the sLOD and arrange for someone else to handle the numbers?” Digit was seated in the only chair in the cell, a repurposed bus driver’s seat I’d appropriated from a wreck a few years back. When he wasn’t medicated he became barely articulate with numbers. especially under stress, despite the fact that his brain could process numerical data faster than an FTL drive computer on a starship. He unzipped his coveralls and took a small ampule from a compartment hidden in the loose folds of the baggy, orange garment. Breaking it in half with trembling fingers, he inhaled the contents cleanly, briefly closed his eyes and exhaled. When he opened his eyes, he met mine with a steady gaze. The trembling in his hands ceased.

            “Sorry about that, Garrett. I’ve been so busy toting up the numbers that it must have slipped my mind. Besides, you weren’t here to remind me.”

            “No, I wasn’t. And before you wear us both out asking, I’m not going to tell you where I went, at least not yet. Tell me the surge numbers.”

            He rolled his eyes upwards so that only the whites showed beneath his drooping lids. After a momentary pause he looked back at me. “A larger than usual turnout this year. Riot troops, eight hundred. Men on leave, close to three thousand. Oh, and there’s at least one woman, an officer.”

            “I don’t have time for jokes, Digit. I just need the surge numbers.”

            “But I’m not joking, those are the numbers.”

            “And the woman?”

            “As real as you or I,” he said. I studied his face for telltale signs of deception. Digit had a uniquely dry sense of humor and during less stressful days, often diffused my anxious questioning with a well-timed laugh inducer. Seeing nothing deceptive in his manner, I decided to accept the answer he’d given. I stripped out of my clothes and stepped into the fresher, a highly desired luxury for even privileged inmates such as myself. A fine mist of steam quickly enveloped me and I felt the aches and bruises from my morning’s activities begin to ease at once.

Digit glanced at my bruised torso and let out a low whistle. “You’re brawling early today, GC.”

“Never mind about me, Digit. You get on to your work station. And close the door behind you.”

            Digit remained in the chair when I stepped out of the fresher. “You’ve had a big morning, I’d guess,” was all he said in response to my stern look.

            “So, why are you still here?”

            “Tiny disappeared last night.”

            I’d hurriedly toweled off and was putting on a fresh pair of jeans and plain grey t-shirt. Not having to wear prison coveralls is another of the small niceties that comes with being a Deputy Marshall.

            “Any idea what happened to him?” ‘Tiny’ Harrowfill arrived in Leaveton six standard months before. He was a simple, gentle enough fellow whose eyes were never still, but twitched from side to side so that he had to constantly blink in time with the motion to be able to focus on anything. He kept his head and beard shaved but had long dark eyelashes that stood out like a north quarter whore’s, and the constant batting of his eyelids served to call attention to them in the most unflattering way. Despite his great size, over two meters tall and scaling close to two hundred kilos, Tiny spoke almost in a whisper and belonged to a troupe of female impersonators. He performed in a small club called “The Other Side of Limbo” in the wedge just north of Heresy under the stage name of Caroline.

            Digit looked at the floor of my cell, probably counting the specks of red dust in the film covering it as he recited the facts. A squad of surge militia, first-timers to Freelife, had come to the club looking for trouble. They’d commandeered the bar, including the bartending slots, and quickly drank themselves into stupidity. That’s how it is with militia, ever since SixKill Day. Whatever claim to decent treatment we convicts owned disappeared forever with the holocaust on Freelife Six.

            I’ve given it some thought. Unrequited wrongs get into the bones of a place, and everyone who comes there feels it. The calculated annihilation of a whole planet, for whatever reason – most people can’t even comprehend the enormity of that. When the killers declare the anniversary of the act a holiday, to celebrate the reestablishment of the rule of law in a system whose entire purpose is to contain the lawless, it riles people up, no matter what degree of separation they might enjoy from the precipitating event.

            Tiny was into his act. He loved playing to a full house and had come off stage and attempted to give a lap dance to a young militia man who’d been taunting him louder than most. When the soldier knocked him to the ground, tearing Tiny’s favorite dress, Tiny responded by slapping him.

            “He’s as good as dead,” Digit said. “They dragged him out bleeding and unconscious. I’ve tried to find out where, but…”

            “Did you get their unit number, name of their commander, anything?”

            “They sprayed the place with Somma before they left. Everyone who witnessed it was still asleep when we found them after they missed breakfast call.”

            “We’re lucky they didn’t burn it down,” I said, pulling my hair back and tying it with the red bandana that symbolizes my so-called office. I figured Digit was right, Tiny was probably already dead. But the fact that his body hadn’t yet turned up, with the whole town crawling with militia and the convict population certainly looking too – news like this travels fast – I decided to act on the assumption he was alive. I’ve got a soft spot for fat kids who never grow out of their childhood traumas and Tiny had done me a good turn or two in his time here. “I’m going to Bernie’s. See what the barflies know.”

            “Lots of militia there, GC. Riot squads have the place surrounded. The barflies deserted the place a while back. Something bad happened at the spaceport, people say. You know anything about that?”

            “Get to your work station, Digit.” Digit worked as an auditor for the live gambling venues, of which there were dozens throughout the town. The sLOD’s kept technology to a minimum here, mostly what was needed for life support, logistics, and administration of the various entertainment enterprises. A brain like Digit’s, one that could think coherently about six things at once, manipulate long strings of complex numbers and formulas, and still allow him to communicate intelligently with ordinary people, me included, kept him solidly in the positive asset column of the sLOD ledgers. At least that was true as long as he took his medication. Off it, he became something else, something that wouldn’t last long, even in the gentler quarters of Leaveton. “Take your meds, Digit. I don’t have time to come looking for you too.”

            He nodded and left. I didn’t have time to go looking for Tiny either, but at least I needed to go to the same place to find information on both the missing ‘Caroline’ and the fugitive Ella Cantor. Having images of the pair in my mind’s eye at the same time I headed down the stairs, lowering my gaze as I passed a line of militia waiting their turn at the fortune teller Ricardo’s shop. They ignored me. I knew that wouldn’t be the case at Bernie’s. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work I go. I have no idea where that came from.

 

            Bernie’s Roundhouse sits in the geographical center of Leaveton, right in the heart of Treachery. The town formed around it, unfolding like a spider along the eight roadways built up over the old rail lines from the colony’s earliest days. The round house originally served as the convergence point for all traffic from the mines, really just dry holes surrounding Leaveton. After the sLODs gave up on mining Freelife Seven, crews of convicts disassembled the tracks, loaded them on interplanetary shuttles, and ferried them off to the asteroids where they were put back into service in the shafts and pits. Bernie’s sits on top of the turntable, the mechanized contraption that used to spin a hundred-ton locomotive and send it off in another direction. Thirty plus meters wide, the turntable still works and it makes for an interesting experience, especially after a few drinks. You see, the turntable is constantly in motion and the eight doors of the tavern never close. The turntable rotates once in a Standard Hour. This means that if you came in door number one, and it was on the south side of the building when you arrived, if you leave five sheets to the wind and two and a half hours later, that door now egresses to the north. Since most convicts don’t own watches, and clocks in a bar are bad for business, there’s a very good chance you’ll be lost when you exit. I think Bernie’s designers planned it that way. Leaveton has avenues that even armed militia men are hesitant to walk into. All cons know this, even those on Leaveton for the first time. If you don’t recognize your surroundings when you exit the place, the best thing to do is turn right around and walk back in. Good business decision, keeping the turntable going; I can almost hear the sLOD boss cackle with avaricious delight, scratching the itch in his palms that never, never quits demanding more.

            The simple fact that a holiday like SixKill exists creates enough tension in the convict population that the presence of riot squads makes good business sense. But when those same squads engage in further acts of passive and active aggression against the population they’re trying to keep in check, the solution almost precipitates the problem it was established to correct.

            As Digit said, a squad of eight hundred riot troops surrounded Bernie’s. They weren’t arrayed in the close, tight circle of shields, helmets, truncheons, and dogs that an actual civil disturbance would create, but grouped together in alert clusters, talking amongst themselves and occasionally grabbing a convict who chanced to make eye contact with them in passing.

            I hoped to get inside without attracting attention, but a one point eight meter convict dressed in civilian clothes and topped with a red bandana hardly ever gets a pass. I doubted that most of the surge troops had ever seen a Deputy Marshall before, let alone understood the significance of the role. I barely understand it. I planned to enter the nearest door, number four, which ingressed to the back side of the bar.  

            A series of large signs had been erected around the circle, digital displays that streamed messages emphasizing the hierarchy of Freelife: “Never forget to lick the hand that feeds you,” and “Life on Freelife is merciful, but mercy isn’t infinite,” and “Don’t become roadkill on SixKill. Yield to all militia traffic,” interspersed with images of the black disk of Freelife Six in a continuous loop. As I studied the militia positions from across the street, I felt a presence at my elbow.

            I don’t have many that I count on among the convict population. Most consider my red bandana a badge of disgrace, somehow thinking I’m in bed with the militia, which couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re all beholden to the company that owns us and whatever our sLOD boss wants, we try to deliver it. I was singled out for this job, for reasons never explained to me, and although there are lots of other things I’d rather do, mining isn’t one of them. However, that’s my only other option at this stage of my life, so I take the stares, the verbal abuse, and the lack of aid in the various projects the boss gives me. And I do have a few in my circle who, like me, are doing the best they can to make it to tomorrow without interfering with others who want to do the same. Guys like Digit. And there are others. One of them stood beside me now.

            Her name is Tohoana and she’s a barmaid at Bernie’s. Barely a meter and half tall with one eye placed notably lower, the result of a crushing head injury in the mines more than fifteen years ago, she’d been at Bernie’s the day I first went there and would probably still be there long after I’d passed out of this world.

            “No gee through dem for now. Not dis way, hot damn, Gee Col’.” Tohoana’s speech impediment stemmed from her head injury. “Too-ah maybe pass you through. You likee dat?”

            “Don’t know if I much like dat, but I need to get in there, preferably without drawing a crowd.”

            She slammed a fist into my upper arm. She’s stout and strong and I’ve seen her drag a passed out drunk in either hand from the center of Bernie’s to the street where she’d throw the limp forms unaided into rickshaws. I winced when she hit me, which made her grin. At least she missed my bruised ribs. “Watch now, Gee Col’. Too-ah gee a pass to it for you.”

            Scampering across the street like a dog after a squirrel, she mounted the cart where the nearest digital sign sat and whistled loud, waving both cons and militia to her. As soon as the first militia man made a move she launched into a ridiculous speech praising the loyal and brave troops who sacrificed their leave time to share it with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells such as lived on Freelife.

            As soon as the nearest riot squad moved toward her, I lowered my head and walked fast for the open doorway. If anyone spoke to me, I didn’t hear them, and in a matter of a few seconds found myself standing on the wet concrete floor inside Bernie’s.

            Scanning the room I guessed the crowd at two hundred being served by twenty, six of whom were behind the bar. The inside of the tavern is modeled on the city, nine rings of crescent shaped standup bars, divided by aisles leading to the various doors. The top is open to the sky, but a light framework criss-crosses the center of the place and a series of ropes around the interior allow a lightweight canvas sheeting to be drawn over the frame in the event of inclement weather. The sweetness in the air had abated some and I hoped Freelife Zero might let us have our party without the solar fireworks.

            A horseshoe stage extends out from the bar, surrounded by a mismatched bunch of stools of varying heights, all of which are securely bolted to the floor. There are thirty in all, each of which was occupied by a militia soldier. Nearly everyone in the place had crowded in behind the stools and I could tell from the glee on the militia faces and quiet horror on the rest that whatever was happening on that stage wasn’t pretty.

            “Dance you piece of shit,” I heard a man yell from the center of the stage, saw a truncheon raised high overhead and heard the dull thud followed by a tremendous crash as something heavy hit the floor of the stage. The troops roared. The convicts backed away. I moved closer, trying to see, when the crowd parted and two militia men, one with his uniform torn, which is the rarest of sights on Freelife, staggered off the stage and straight toward me struggling to drag an enormous limp figure between them. I’d found Tiny Harrowfill.

            He was almost naked, his dress in shreds and from the bruises I could see he’d been beaten for hours. To my surprise he was still breathing and that inspired something foolish inside me. I met the eyes of the man with the torn uniform.

“Whatever you’re looking at, red, you best enjoy it. It might be the last thing you ever see.” I put up my hands, the universal gesture for ‘I just want to talk,’ but the militia man wasn’t having any of it. “Tell you what, cockscomb, since you want to see this, you can help. Carry the ass end of this whale.” He was plainly intoxicated, weaving slightly, his eyes red, and hands trembling. Our moonshine, made mostly from … well, never mind that, might poison a man after a single glass, or he might drink all week long and never show any sign of intoxication. There are no quality control standards. That keeps costs down, an important element in a prison economy.

I stopped, avoiding all further eye contact, and stared at Tiny. Lying as he was, with a crease in his scalp and a trickle of blood running down onto the bar’s floor, he actually looked a great deal smaller than I was accustomed to thinking of him.

“Carry it where?” I was on tenuous ground and knew it. Keeping my pronouns impersonal might delay what I knew was coming.

“Out of here. Gonna put it back under whatever rock it crawled out from.” The militia man was pulling at the ripped sleeve, unsuccessfully trying to tuck it under where it had parted.

“You mean boulder, brother. Got to be a boulder,” his companion said, laughing and resting a foot atop one of Tiny’s enormous thighs.

“And you’re helping,” the first said, leaning in close and thumping me in the chest with two fingers. When I didn’t jump to it he turned to look at his partner, and when he turned back he held a thick steel truncheon withdrawn from his belt that he used to point at Tiny. “Less’n you figure on being carried out as well.”

I ignored the man with the truncheon for the moment. He was the drunker of the two and I’d see him move toward me in time to defend myself. Turning to face his partner I adjusted the bandana before speaking.

“You called me red, so you know what this means, right?” I pointed at the rag on my head.

“Yeah, sure. Means you’re a pussycat, rubbing up some boss’s leg so’s you can pretend to not be the dirt digging shit-eater that you so obviously are.” He made a face and pinched his nostrils.

I locked eyes with him at that point. He was a good head taller than me, dressed in riot gear, and obviously looking to hurt someone, I mean really hurt them. I wasn’t afraid, and I wanted him to know it. Cold blood.

“Show ‘em you’re afraid and you might just as well piss yourself and creep away while they laugh, boy,” Gramps once told me after I ran from a fight. I think I was eight at the time.

I thought about Tohoana outside and decided to give her tactics a try.

“It also means I’m the Deputy Marshall and if this convict has done something to offend the service, the proud men and women who are here to protect us from unsavory and violent criminal types…” A small crowd was gathering, anticipating action. I guessed most wanted to see me laid out beside Tiny who was starting to groan a little.

“Hey, is that sarcasm?” the truncheon-wielding man interrupted. “I hate sarcasm when it comes from my own mates, but to have it expelled from the mouth of a worm-licker, makes me want to hit something,” and he tried. He really tried. The truncheon came up fast, but wide and I ducked under it easily. The crowd roared and it might have been a good show if the second militia man, who was taller, faster, and a lot more sober than his buddy, hadn’t grabbed me from behind, using his own club as a choke bar, and held me long enough for two others to join him. They had me on the ground in an instant and I felt the toe of a boot slam into my back, hitting a kidney. Before the lightning hot pain really registered, a flurry of punches and kicks came at me from everywhere. All I could do was cover up and try to not to get kicked in the head. No doubt about it, I was at Bernie’s on SixKill Day.

It didn’t last long. A hard kick got through and caught me under the chin, snapping my head back. As a black tunnel closed around me, I tried to roll away but hit some immovable obstacle just as I saw the truncheon come up. Another boot hit me in the solar plexus and I quit fighting the black cloud closing around my vision. Better not to see this, I decided, recalling too late that Tohoana’s stunt had been designed to draw the militia’s attention away from me. I hoped she’d fared better than I was. At least I’d saved Tiny taking any more abuse.

 

Someone threw a bucket of ice water on me and I smelled limes as a pair of hands closed on either side of my head while soft thumbs gently massaged my temples. In my semi-shattered state I thought they belonged to Ella Cantor. I pursed my lips so she could kiss me.

“Gee up, Col’ or thee do no more to leave.” Citrus breath contrasted with a raspy, harsh voice that made me shudder like my fingernails were being pried slowly back. I tried to cling to my delusion when a tiny fist buried itself in my stomach. “Gee up, now, Col’, they drinkin’ to you.” The soft thumbs became hard palms alternately slapping my cheeks as the voice continued to implore me to “Gee up.”

I opened my eyes, wanting desperately to see blonde hair and a feminine face exuding power through the eyes even if I saw them over the edge of a razor about to slit my throat. I grabbed the wrists of my assailant and pushed them down, quickly glancing over my shoulder.

“Gee up, Col’.”

“Take it easy, Tohoana. I’m hurtin’ here.”

“Thee’ ill stop you hurt f’ever if you no gee up,” she said, evidently considering it a matter of some urgency that I get out of the bar as soon as possible.

At one end of the crescent I could see the two militia men surrounded by their comrades in arms, toasting and laughing. Every so often one or the other of them would look my way and point off behind me. I thought it was a trick and didn’t look.

“Help me up, then. I think you’re right, it might be time to go.” My jaw ached and was starting to swell. I wouldn’t be kissing anyone for several days. Ella would just have to wait.

Somehow we got me to my feet. I kept my head down just enough to be able to see the increasingly drunk militia men without their seeing me. Tohoana was justified in her concern, I thought. They’d drink a bit and then come back for some more fun. I got to my feet, leaning on Tohoana, whose brown and solid body bore me up without straining her. She might be small, but her presence remained large after two decades in the system. Some of the newmeat, when they hear the story of her accident, want to rub her face for luck before heading back to the mines. Those who try have lost fingers to her strong teeth and jaw. She keeps a collection of trophies in a wooden box under the bar. She poked me hard in the ribs.

“Easy, girl. Something might be broken in there.” I tried to shove her back but her stout, strong legs might just as well have been cemented to the floor.

 “You go, now, Col’. Gee on to no be here.” She was pushing me as my vision finally cleared. There was a terrible ringing in my ears and I really wanted to just lie back down and let them kill me. At least I saved Tiny, I thought. I turned to go when it occurred to me I ought to have been more seriously hurt. I saw the truncheon go up as I had fallen. Where had that blow landed? And then I looked down. Tiny Harrowfill lay spread-eagled on the floor, a rusty piece of rebar that had been twisted into a corkscrew shape shoved into what had been his mouth, but was now a wounded red hole of broken teeth and foamy pink gore.

I now knew what had blocked me in my attempt to roll away. Tiny’s eyes were open, staring lifelessly up at mine, the big hero who ‘saved’ him. I could see the compression fracture in his forehead, where the truncheon had fallen, like a whale stove ship from a story I’d heard from Gramps years ago. A blow like a blacksmith might have struck, swinging for the floor beneath Tiny, oblivious to the human being. I looked in his eyes. For the only time since I’d known him, they were absolutely still.

I heard heavy steps behind me and turned to see the squad of militia men, all holding either drinks, or their clubs. Some held both. I wondered if this was the moment to piss myself. For the first time since entering Bernie’s, I had an opportunity to look around, scanning the vast room for allies other than Tohoana. I recalled the radio in my pocket, wondered if it had survived the beating I’d taken. A useless thought. Nobody helps a convict who runs afoul of the militia on SixKill Day.

“Dem been somes here, might can see no you die,” Tohoana said, as if reading my thoughts.

“That thing your party girl, Marshall?” The tall militia man who’d held me for the first assault asked, swilling his drink and looking around at his mates for approval.

“Nah, it’s too purty for the Marshall.”

“And too tall!”

“And besides, I think the Marshall prefers fat, dead whales.” At this the whole squad roared. I turned to look at Tiny, hoping that this teasing was the limit of what lay ahead, all the time certain it was not.

“Yeah, hey, Marshall, get down there and give it a kiss.”

“Or better yet, let’s see you harpoon it. Go ahead, the whale’s dead. It won’t mind. You got your harpoon there, Marshall? Whip it out. We won’t laugh.” They all laughed.

One of the men stepped forward to stare down Tiny’s bloody throat. “Looks like it already been harpooned, and whatever did it left its screw-pipe behind!” More laughter. I looked up and Tohoana was gone, slipped away in the midst of the barrage of words. I tried to see her but in the dim light of the bar and the heavy morning air I couldn’t make out much of anything.

I could see they were growing tired of their word game. The circle had tightened around me and I tensed, trying not to show it, watching for the sign of the first assault, assessing the sobriety, or lack thereof, of each of the men that faced me. If one of the very drunk ones got bold first, I’d determined to kill him with the same violence that the bastards had murdered Tiny. They might still get me in the end, but I planned to make them earn every drop of my blood. “…too dangerous to leave in the mines,” the boss had said. Right, I thought, wondering who’d inherit the red bandana.

The lights in the tavern abruptly dimmed. Sniffing the air I smelled the sweet scent of ionized gases filling the place. A new kind of paranoia bloomed in my aching head. Ella Cantor’s escape might have mattered more to the sLOD than I knew. SixKill Day. Why not SevenKill? The arrogant manner of her escape might be just the thing to spark a retaliatory over-reaction. Digit once told me it made no sense to keep this enterprise going. When I asked why, he lectured me about robotics and nano-mining techniques, stuff that Grampa would have understood but that left me lost and with a dizzy headache. I finally stopped him with a raised palm and the phrase “One sentence, Digit.”

“Economics, GC. It’d be a lot cheaper to just kill us.” But they hadn’t, not for a century. Until today. The huge offensive cruisers, using quantum agitators to siphon power from electro-magnetic fields at distances up to one A.U., might even now be in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The dimming of the lights and the sudden infusion of the atmosphere with ions pretty well had me convinced we were all about to die. I listened for the whistle of the incoming rockets.

“So Marshall, what’s it gonna be?” It was the man with the torn uniform, now clumsily patched with the ubiquitous yellow adhesive used for repairing everything from pressure suits to fuel packs on high energy drills. “There’s a carcass needs carried outta here. There could be two.” He’d probably taken a stimulant. He seemed much steadier on his feet.

I couldn’t understand why they were so calm. “You know we’re all about to die.”

They looked around, some laughed, a few nodded, most just gave me the same half-interested stare, waiting for a chance to take a poke at me.

“We are?” The man made a great show of taking his pulse, feeling his forehead for fever and sticking his tongue out while asking a buddy to look at his throat. “I don’t even feel sick, Marshall.”

“Don’t you see it?” I said, waving at the lights. “Can’t you smell it? There’s a cruiser out there right now, ready to nuke the whole planet. And it’s your fault, all of you, for letting her escape.”

“Cruiser? A militia cruiser? Here?” The man turned to someone at the back of the crowd which had grown to include pretty much everyone in the bar. “LT, we expecting to be blasted to powder today, oh, and by one of our own ships at that?”

From some distant, dark area near the far wall a voice called out, it might have been a man or woman. The militia had both, especially among junior officers, though I’d never encountered a female officer on Freelife. “Post, quit jerking around. You and Moron-o-kivitch get that body out of here and leave the Deputy Marshall alone.” I tried to see the speaker and was surprised to spot the heavy outline of Tohoana, standing next to the source of the voice which remained deep in shadow.

There were a few snickers at the name Moron-o-skivitch. “Dumb and dumber did it again,” someone said followed by more laughter. My inquisitor wasn’t amused.

“His name is Morrischenko,” he said through clenched teeth and that made me smile. At least if I was going to die today it wouldn’t be at this man’s hand. Post stepped close to me, his brow furrowed. “You must not be much of a Marshall, Marshall, if you don’t know that a transport landed here today. It’s due to leave about now. Probably just picking up a few extra joules before departure.”

He was probably right.

He pushed me back and waved to Morrischenko, who came forward, glancing over his shoulder, presumably at the LT. As he passed me he asked “You said we let ‘her’ escape. Who might that be, exactly? Convicts are things, so you can’t be talking about a prisoner.”

My head was far from clear, something other than being kicked in the jaw affecting me. Pulse racing, stomach tight, an increasing feeling of warmth from temples, and a dull weight at the base of my skull all constricted my speech and movement. I touched the places Toahona had been massaging and felt something oily on my hair and scalp. I smelled my fingertips. A heavy scent of citrus mixed with smoke made my head spin so that I nearly dropped to a knee. Tohoana, who had reappeared, moved in beside me, offering me a shoulder to lean on.  I wasn’t about to thank her, but I accepted her aid. I decided silence would serve me best at this moment. Morrischenko and his partner, glared at me as they hoisted Tiny’s upper body from the floor. Two other militia men came to their aid.

“The rest of you, back to base,” the LT said from the distance. I tried to see him (her?), the voice really was hard to distinguish, probably an effect of whatever drug Tohoana had administered.

“You drugged me,” I said, feeling noticeably weaker. “Why?”

She grinned and said nothing.

I looked again and stared toward the far side of the space. The group that included the LT seemed to be moving toward me. Though still in shadows, it looked like five or six men and a woman. Something familiar about the way the woman walked, hands loose at her sides, head turning from side to side, still in shadow. I was wobbly and my eyes couldn’t seem to focus. Tohoana let me slide easily to the floor. I tried to speak but couldn’t work either tongue or jaws so that only a low moaning sound accompanied by a sliver of drool came out. I saw polished boots, lots of them, all around me.

“All right,” a voice that I thought was a woman’s said. “Bring him.” Hands, so many hands, grabbed my legs and arms. I was floating up off the floor, held in the claws of a million-legged beast, my head lolling back. In the haze I could just make out a complicated and long braid of blonde hair moving before me. Ella? Impossible.  

“All in, boy,” was the last thing I heard on SixKill Day. Whether it was Grampa, some random gambler at Bernie’s, or my own conscience I couldn’t say.