Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers, Chapter Ten -- The Engineer

 

 

Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers

 

Chapter Ten – The Engineer

 

“You alive, boy?” The voice was soft, more like the echo of something remembered. But it was Grampa. That more than anything made me believe I had died. The old man could not have survived the collapse of the arena roof. Neither could I.

“No.” I felt something nudge my shoulder, and then a gust of sour breath laced with the coppery tinge of blood filled the dust-laden air surrounding me.

“That you, Garrett?” Grampa again, the last word trailing off as if he had expelled the last of the tidal air from his bleeding lungs.

I’d never thought much about death. It was a thing that happened to every living creature. I suppose it happened to non-living entities as well, even galaxies and stars, although you have to stretch the definition of life to make that work out. I figured that one day I just wouldn’t be around. It would be like sleep, only without dreams and without ever waking up. In my darkest days on Freelife I counted it a blessing that the dead never knew of their plight. Of course that was before I saw Cypher with his head lolling to the side and the black blood spilling down the front of his body. He was dead. He knew it. It was a dream, but it felt like something more. Was this a dream?

Something nudged me again. I was lying on my back. The left side of my body was immobilized by something heavy, hard, and smooth. The nudge was on the right and that arm was free. All the strength I’d felt in the moment before the domed ceiling of the arena came down seemed to have been an illusion.

“You’re in shock, boy. Move something. Give me your hand.” The pressure on my shoulder moved down the length of my body until I felt Grampa’s fingers touch the back of my hand. When he clasped it, his grip was surprisingly strong. “Cold blood, boy. Hard to kill us, don’t you think.”

“Grampa, what happened?”

“How’d you know, boy? How’d you know that the way to bring this place down was to kill old Dockrill?”

“What?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I remembered the knife, the micro-serrations and the crystal handle dripping crimson in the last light of the arena’s life. I’d slashed, but it wasn’t me doing the slashing. The knife moved of its own accord. I just held it. Dockrill had given it to me, wanted me to kill Grampa for some terrible imagined deed now three decades gone. It wasn’t justice Dockrill wanted. It had to be vengeance. Nothing else could cause a man to grow so old, so bitter. “Grampa, Dockrill, how old was he?”

Grampa suppressed a laugh but not soon enough. He fell into a fit of coughing and immediately I worried that I’d killed him with a question. I reached my free arm out and felt his long boned body. Sweeping the air above and beside him I realized that he was apparently free of the crushing rubble that lay all around and above us. We were in a pocket of ruin. How we were still alive, and I wasn’t yet convinced that we were, was a mystery that might never unfold its secrets.

“Never mind. You said I killed him.”

Grampa just grunted, still winded from the coughing fit. I patted his chest, gently as I was able. In a few moments his breath, which had been shallow and irregular steadied itself.

“See, boy. We Colds gotta stick together. We’re exponentially stronger that way. Like a three-fold chord.” I thought he might want to shift positions as I felt his muscles tense and the slight shifting of the sands near me. I thought about what had to be tons of rock above us. The air was thick with decay, dust, blood, and something else, a smell I recognized from my first brush with death, from that day on the cliff face with the cougar’s yellow eyes staring down at me. Blast!

“Grampa, don’t move. Don’t want to be crushed.”

“We already are, boy. We’re alive, sure, for the moment. But I doubt anyone will be rushing to dig us out. And what’s the likelihood that whoever comes will be engineers with a sense for preserving whatever might be alive under all of this? No, we’re as good as crushed. It just ain’t happened yet.”

I thought about the others now. The living and the dead all entombed beneath the ruin of Freelife’s darkest structure, in a dungeon of horrors. I wondered if any of the flesh-eating worms were still alive. I began to scan my body for damage.

No pain.A buzzing in my ears, more pronounced on the side Grampa had fixed after my cell blew up. My left side was pinned but it seemed that whatever lay atop me had either fallen gently or had rolled over at the end of the collapse. The sand was deep and loose here. The weight of whatever trapped me pressed me into it, but I could move my fingers, flex the muscles all down that side of my body, even bend my ankle. I wondered if I dared wiggle out from underneath the weight, or if I was the last barrier to the final collapse. Like a keystone in an arch, I thought, thinking back to my earliest lessons with Grampa. Hard to say what I was thinking. Mostly, I fought back panic. Being buried alive never was on my bucket list.

“Boy, I’m not going to be here much longer.”

“Don’t say that, Grampa.”

“No sense denying it. If I don’t die in this hole, I sure as hell will as soon as Dockrill’s followers see I’m still breathing. That old bastard has waited a long time for this day.”

“Who is he, Grampa, really?”

There was a long pause, as if Grampa was listening to the sounds in the arena. The collapse had extinguished or blocked every light source. There had been others alive around us when it happened so it was possible that Tohoana or Ella Cantor might hear Grampa’s answer. Not that it would do any of them any good. It was only a matter of hours, perhaps less, for those of us not already dead.

“I thought you knew, boy.” Another pause.

“He said he knew Hal Wright. He implied that he was alive when Wright broke the light barrier.”

“Did you believe him?”

“What? No, how could I.”

“Did he show you his chart, the one with just Earth and Mars, when the rest of the galaxy was blessedly empty of so-called intelligent life?”

“I saw a chart. He could have forged it. There are a number of talented forgers on Freelife.”

“I saw it too. And that’s what I thought, at first. But he let me really look at it. Did you know there’s a lab down her somewhere where a claim like that can be verified? He let me have it and he gave me the run of that lab.”

“When did all of this happen?”

“Before you and I hooked up again. During SixKill I suppose.” He stopped and I heard him grunt, as if he’d tried to move a heavy weight. “I knew better than to trust him then, but I thought he’d sunk about as low as he could get. I guess I thought he really did need my help.”

I thought about the other map I’d seen, the one Grampa had started. Someone else had finished it, but Grampa’s drawing and lettering style was unmistakable. He had a whole library of charts, terraforming plans from most of the Seventy Worlds, back on Thebes.

“I saw a chart you made too. Did you give that to them?”

“To whom, boy?”

“Ella, Dockrill, Rheynhardt, Digit,” I was getting angry with him. He’d kept me in the dark for so long. “I don’t know who. I saw the chart. It was your writing, your style.”

He tensed next to me again, just a slight rippling of the muscles lining his torso.

“I gave it to Cassandra. I gave it to the Liberty Keepers.”

Was that right? I’d been so bounced around, beaten up, almost killed and revived and killed again that I had no idea if he was telling the truth or not. I couldn’t put events in any sort of sequential order, not from the moment I’d climbed the face of the Anglehorn to watch Ella Cantor’s arrival.

“Back to Dockrill’s chart,” I said

“It’s the genuine article. Do you remember the blue pencil labeling?”

I thought about this. That was what confused me. The map Grampa had drawn – Cassie’s map – was incomplete, but I’d seen another one when I was with Dockrill. It had more detail on it, detail not in Grampa’s style. Blue pencil details, just like the ancient star chart. Was that the same map Cassie had shown me? But how would Grampa know about the blue pencil if Dockrill added that later? Someone had duplicated Grampa’s map. But who, and for what purpose?

“Are you telling me that Dockrill really is over a thousand years old?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Grampa, don’t do this. If I understand you we’re about to go down the ride of some time travel paradox and you and I both know that FTL doesn’t work that way, not anymore, not since, well, not since Hal Wright. I’m tired of being strung along by you and everyone else in this life. Let me at least die knowing why.”

“You said time travel paradox…doesn’t add up, not since Hal Wright.”

“I did. And you know it.”

“Yup. Not since Hal Wright. That’s about the size of it.”

“Are you saying that Dockrill is a time traveler from that era? Is Dockrill,” I blanched at the path my thoughts opened from the miasma of confusion, the dust and smells of the collapsed Arena playing some trick on my mind, but the question was there, “Is he Hal Wright?”

Grampa almost died during the coughing fit that burst from beneath his laughter. I patted his chest and then gripped his hand, or rather he gripped mine, so tightly I thought he might break every bone in it. He calmed down.

Through clenched teeth he told me, “No, Dockrill isn’t Hal Wright. He’s not fit to even say the name.”

“Then what, who is he?”

The old man took a raspy breath, one that was arrested by a spasm. He choked, fighting to control his lungs. I worried about another coughing fit. If he had broken ribs, he might have internal bleeding. He might drown in his own blood. But I needed answers. It was just a matter of time and degree, the space between each of us trapped in the tomb Dockrill’s arena had become. Grampa was the more seriously wounded, but our predicament said I was equally doomed.

“He was a militia recruit, one of the first. He was on the squad that watched Hal Wright’s return and second jump, just like he said. But he was off the reservation already. Ambitious and mean and determined to establish a dynasty of warriors, a man who drew his ambition from the likes of the ancient madmen, Caesar and Alexander and Hitler.”

“He sounds like Rheynstadt.”

And Grampa didn’t say a word. Like I was a boy on Thebes again, he let me work it out on my own.

“But that’s not possible—how could he?”

“He was the first interstellar stowaway, Garrett. He was in the right place at the right time, which says something about the universe’s sense of humor if it lets a parasite like Dockrill Castello be alone in a tiny scout ship at almost the exact coordinates where Hal Wright emerged from the wormhole. And he understood just enough of the ways of such matters to be able to stow away on Hal Wright’s vessel so that when Wright jumped back out, Dockrill was just another AWOL militia man.”

“But Hal Wright didn’t jump back out. His ship exploded. It’s in all of the records.”

“Or Dockrill, our wayfaring megalomaniac, doctored the history to suit his nefarious plans.” Grampa seemed like he wanted to say more, but instead lay quietly for a moment.

“Why?” I was determined to have an answer.

“I think you’re asking the wrong question, boy.”

“Just tell me, Grampa.”

“He wanted to learn how Wright had done it. And he did. And he’s been pretty much able to bounce back and forth between now and the past without any interference at all.” I was dumbstruck. Grampa chuckled. “You know why the sLOD and the militia moved away from Wright’s methods of travel? You thought it was because of the danger of death, of having your ship explode. But that wasn’t the concern at all. No, that technology is no better or worse than anything else we humans cooked up over the past few millennium. The sLOD buried it and the militia keep it that way because what Hal Wright discovered was a way to slide backwards and forwards in time, which is just what Dockrill does, or did until you filleted him. And by the way, his first alias when he came back at the time of the first expansion was Marco Rheynstadt.”

The founding father of the Rheynstadt militia dynasty. I felt sick to my stomach.

“How long has this gone on?”

“In real time? Seventy years or so. Dockrill has bridged a lot of space and time, but he’s a man, getting older every day at about the same rate you and I do.”

“So Dockrill travels forward and backward in time, using a technique Hal Wright accidentally discovered? And although thousands of years have passed, he’s been able to jump in and out of history at just the right moments to reshape the universe to some sinister plan of his own?”

“That’s what it looks like from the my place in it, boy. And you pretty much got there on your own too.”

“How do you know this?”

“If I tell you, you have to promise me something.”

I was ready to slug him, dying or not, I needed an answer.

“What,” I said through gritted teeth.

“That’s the boy I know. You get all riled up, but you direct it where it will do some good. You promise me that you won’t go off this planet ever unless it’s to Thebes, and then only with a battalion to back you up.”

It was the first mention since the collapse that Grampa, in some crazy way, thought I might get out of here alive. I tried to recall the details of our conversation. What changed? Which of the reflective pauses had left him with such a revelation?

“What are you talking about? That’s crazy You said so, we’re in our final resting place.We just haven’t died yet..”

“Just promise me.”

“Fine, I promise.” I felt like I’d been arguing with a child.

He didn’t say a word for so long that I thought he might have died. I put my hand on his chest.

“I’m alive, don’t you worry about that yet, boy. I just need to say this the right way.”

“Just say it, Grampa. I promised, now I need to know. How do you know about Dockrill?”

“When your daddy came to Freelife Six, I was working on a special sLOD project. We had just about finished creating the first perfect planet. Better than Thebes it was. Freelife Six was the prototype for the most ambitious undertaking in human history.” He paused for breath, but not long. He seemed to be getting stronger the more he talked. I wonder if he hadn’t given himself a boost of some sort, like the kind Ella Cantor’s muses gave to me.

“My daddy…” I suddenly was the one who couldn’t breathe as the word caromed around my head like an errant shot from a pole-shifting blaster projectile in a magnetized room.

“He was on Rheynstadt’s ship, the one that carried the nukes that destroyed Freelife Six. He was a sorry ass son-of-a-bitch with nothing to live for once he’d fathered you. Abandoned you as soon as he learned the girl that would become your mother was pregnant, at least that’s what I think. There’s others not of the same low opinion. Anyhow, when your Daddy came he was flying solo, locked inside a scout ship with a dead man switch on the helm.”

I knew about dead man switches. It was a nefarious device from several centuries past when the death penalty was still widely practiced across the Seventy Worlds at the height of their prosperity and arrogance. Rather than burden he populace with the moral responsibility for taking a life and having a body to dispose of, society saw to it that convicts sentenced to pay the ultimate price were strapped in long range disposable vessels, blasted out of orbit and away from any inhabited world. When the ship was far enough out, a radio signal activated a bomb under the pilot’s chair. But it didn’t go off at once. As long as the convict stayed awake and held on to the control stick, which was disabled for every purpose but one, the ship flew straight and true into the great beyond. As soon as he let go of the stick, Boom! It was crazy and expensive, but it was also terrifying. The sort of thing the Kinkies thought of as a deterrent to crime, forcing a man to leave this life fully aware that he was the instrument of his own demise. After all, a society that would go to that length to send a man to the ‘outer darkness,’ as the old religions called it, was not a system to be bucked, at least not very often.

“Death is the road to awe,” I said, quoting part of the sentencing protocol in the early days of the Kinky courts. Funny I hadn’t thought about the Kinkies or anything related to Thebes for a long time. You might think I’d have rehashed everything once I was freed of the psycho-restraints of a prisoner, but it takes time for the brain to come back from something like that.

“You know, I suspect those bastards lifted that from some early philosopher. I’ve searched for the etymology but never could figure it out.”

“Grampa, you knew my father.”

“I was there when he died.”

“Where is there?”

“Freelife Six. SixKill day. Me, Dominicus, and Dockrill Castello were all there.”

“You were on Freelife Six? What happened?”

“The Judgment, that was the ship, was supposed to be on a relief mission, carrying supplies to the terraforming team, but Rheynstadt and his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great…how many is that.”

“Grampa.”

“Dockrill, that’s who I’m talking about, he and Rheynstadt had swapped the cargo. Replaced our supplies with two hundred dirty warheads.”

“And the story about Rural Caggonar?”

“That was something the sLOD cooked up with the militia to satisfy the softies. A docile populace is the only way a thing like this works, you know. The whole setup depends on keeping the masses fed and entertained so the ambitious can act without too much oversight or opposition. Occasionally they need someone to hate so they don’t forget that their good life comes with a price.”

I knew that, knew that because the crimes of which I’d been convicted were only possible in a world where apathy outweighed interest.

“But if the sLOD were supporting you, supporting the terraforming plan, why did Rheynstadt get away with what he did?”

Grampa again grew quiet. When he spoke it was in a half-whisper.

“Garrett, when the sLOD are involved, you best not ask too many questions. Rheynstadt has been kept around all this time for reasons none of us understand. As to Dockrill, well, he’s a special case. The first man to live outside time, in a manner of speaking. Of course Hal Wright would have been the first had Dockrill not killed him.

“And something else, boy. I never said I was part of the terraforming team. I said I was on a special project for the sLOD. You need to clean the sand out of your ears and pay attention if you expect to have any hope of understanding things while you’re on this side of the divide between hither and yon.”

I would have kicked something if there had been room. Now, when I was trapped hundreds of meters below the surface of the most distant inhabited world in the galaxy, probably facing an agonizing death from either hunger or asphyxiation, or if we got lucky, we’d all be squashed like insects when the random structure created by the collapse came apart, only now did I know anything about who I was, where I’d come from. It didn’t matter at all, and yet I needed to know, all of it. “And what about my father? How did he die? Who was my mother? Are you even my real grandfather or was all that talk about Cold blood just a way to keep me under your control?”

“Control? No one can control you, Garrett. Oh, I’m your grandfather all right, only that rotten son of mine had no idea. You see, I met your grandmother years before. She was older. A powerful woman whose own husband was an impotent—why am I wasting my last breaths speaking ill of the dead. The point is, your daddy was my son. I knew it. Hell, I helped to get him shipped out on the Judgment. Saved him from dying in a Kinky prison in all likelihood.”

“So he could be killed nuking a few thousand men and women.”

“You forget, Garrett. The folks sent to Freelife aren’t people anymore. How could you forget a thing like that?”

“You said he was militia.”

“Did I?”

I was stunned. Did Grampa actually believe that what the softies did to us was justifiable? I wanted to die for weeks after my sentencing. I couldn’t talk about it, but imagine being sent as far away from home as you can with no hope of ever returning, not even after death. You simply are erased from the role of humanity, no matter who you were, what you did. At least if you were killed by the state there would be media coverage. But the Kinky way, demoting us to property and shipping us out while expunging every record of our existence so that the only way anyone knew where we went was if they were in the courtroom, that was in many ways worse than any death they could give us. The press was forbidden at the trials and the families never discussed the fate of their unfortunate kin with anyone. Violations of the law of silence often resulted in a few more transports to our forgotten island of misery.

“Now listen to me, boy.” He coughed again, and then cried out before falling silent. I had to shake him a long time before he came back around. “My back’s broke, Garrett” Grampa said. “I tried to move. How long was I out?”

I had no idea and just patted his hand, hoping he’d lie still. I had to get us out of the rubble heap. I began to inch back and forth where I was pinned by whatever had fallen on me. I thought it might be one of the many columns rising up from the seats surrounding the sand pit. The sand was deep and if I was right, the column was at least ten meters tall. It ought to stay put even if I slithered out from under it. The problem, I realized, wasn’t getting out, it was getting clear without moving Grampa. He was almost touching me. If I pulled free too fast I risked jarring him in a way that might be the end of him. I needed to test the theory of his broken back.

“Grampa, can you wiggle your toes?”

“Give it up, Garrett. I done all that already, or rather I tried. Even my best friend, Mr. Goodwillie, is struck numb by this break. Not that I care a whit. At my age I’ve get better things to do than spread seed.”

“So your back is really…”

“Yes, ow! Now quit asking. What do want to know for?”

“I’m pinned on my left side, but I think I can wiggle out.”

There was a moment in which we both fell silent. There were sounds from somewhere near us. Someone else moving.

“Who’s there?” I called, repeating myself when the darkness lapsed back into silence.

“Probably another corpse like us,” Grampa offered. “Listen, boy, you ain’t going to do any more damage to me than has already been done. If you need my help pulling you out, forget it. But if you need to climb over me in order to get free, then you go ahead. I think old Dockrill is crushed right beside me. If you could step a little harder on him, I’d be obliged.”

The sounds near us had begun again. It was faint, but someone else was definitely alive and had more freedom of movement than either Grampa or I did.

“Who is that?” I called. “I can hear you moving. You must know we’re trapped. Tell us your name at least.”

“Gee Cole? You’re living sticks good, eh?”

“Tohoana. Where are you?”

“Lights out, Gee Cole. I no can reach you.”

“Can you get out of here? Can you bring help?”

She didn’t answer and I wondered if she was perhaps fading in and out of consciousness. She’d already had one almost fatal head injury in her lifetime. While she might be used to the sensation, I doubted her skull could take much more reshaping.

“Tohoana, are you hurt?”

“Not too much to stop your beating heart. And the killer of my people too.”

“Your people?”

That was when Grampa took my hand and squeezed so hard I almost cried out. He seemed to be trying to pull me toward him. I leaned my head over near where I thought his mouth was.

“We’re dead, boy.”

“Why?” I whispered back.

“Hear that accent?”

“I thought it was a speech impediment due to brain damage.”

“Shut up and listen. What you don’t know, what no one back on the softie worlds knows, and what I’ve been trying to tell you is that Freelife Six…” he stopped.

“What about Six, Grampa? Tell me, damn you, tell me.”

“We weren’t the first to discover her.”

“What?”

“Shush, Garrett. Just hear me. The place was inhabited when we got there. And the sLOD and Rheynstadt, Dockrill, Dominicus, and I – we annihilated them. All of them, I thought. But that accent, you never forget it. They learned our language so fast. Rural Cagganor was the first to find them. Hidden underground. He was so happy, that son-of-a-bitch. They’re how he was able to overrun the planet.”

“Why hasn’t this gotten out? Why don’t people know?”

Grampa knew I would figure the answer out on my own. He collapsed and I had to check his chest several times to see if he was still breathing.

Of course, I thought. Humankind’s greatest fear, that we weren’t alone in the cosmos, and that whoever found us wouldn’t be friendly, and would in all likelihood have superior technology. Freelife Six had to be wiped clean. A plausible cover story had to be told. Yet I couldn’t bear the thought of the magnitude of our crime. We, Homo sapiens, had wiped out a whole race of people except for one. Why was Tohoana still alive? How had she fallen in with Dockrill? And, if Ella Cantor was still living, how did she fit into all of this?

“Fuck me, Grampa,” I said aloud.

“We’re all fucked, Garrett. If there’s one of them alive, there are probably others.”

“What, no, I’ve been here seven years. She’s the only one.”

He laughed, a little too loud, like a man with nothing left to hide.

“How would you know that, boy? You don’t even know what they really look like.”

“Let her kill us,” I said. Death would be welcome now. I didn’t see a way out and what I knew of life, the universe, and all it’s inescapable plans left me feeling like dying was the only way to really find peace. I was with Grampa. I could remember the best of our time together and breathe my last as Tohoana choked the life from me.

“No, Garrett. I been figuring while you been jawing. You have to get out of here. And you have to get back to Thebes.”

“Why?”

He sighed. It was the sigh of a man tired of explaining the simplest matters to a child, but knowing that children grew in a soup composed of their own experimentation and the seasoned wisdom of the elders who came before, he patiently bore my questions.

“Your mother, Garrett. She’s still alive. And she’d want to see you, I think.”

That was almost too much. I felt a tie that went back the days before I could reason on my own, a tie loosed by distance and events and the conspiratorial minds of evil and selfish men and women. It was loose, but intact. And now, something inside pulled it tight. My mother was alive!

I felt tears ready to burst forth. Why that was, I couldn’t say. Something about mother son bonds that dates back to the dawn of humanity, I suppose.

“My mother.”

“Yup. That’s about the size of it. She’s got the rest of the answers you’re chasing. She probably knows more than I do. If you can find her before Dockrill’s crew does you might have a chance to set some long-standing wrongs right again. Hal Wright, well, Hal would have been the savior of humanity if Dockrill hadn’t killed him. Maybe you can take his place. Tohoana and her kind, they’re ready to move again. She wouldn’t have revealed herself to me otherwise. Garrett, for your mother, you have to get out of here.”

“Why Thebes?”

He was almost gone. The fracture in his spine along with the beatings he’d endured seemed too much for whatever enhancements he’d made to overcome. His words came out in starts and feeble bursts of breath.

“Look at my — charts.”

“My mother? Is she on Thebes.”

“My charts, Garrett.” He sucked in a great lungful of air and shook his head violently. “Charts will — tell all you…” his voice trailed off and he ceased to move.

Nearby I heard something moving through the rubble. Tohoana. Hunting us.

Without saying another word I reached across Grampa’s body and grabbed his far hand. He was still alive. His fingers gripped mine, held on tight. I imagined him biting his lip as he used to do whenever a sharp pain overtook him, but he didn’t scream, not even when I leveraged myself over him and pulled free of the weight atop me. His broken body shifted, sliding on loose sand into the depression where I’d been. I rolled clear and heard a scrape of metal on stone, and then the column unexpectedly shifted. I heard a soft crunch and felt warm fluid gush out from beneath it.

From the darkness ahead I heard a harsh whisper. “Gee Cole? I coming for you. Hold on.”

“Grampa?” I felt for him. Only the cold rock of the collapsed column met my searching fingers.