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Fresh installments will appear monthly, on the first of the month, until the novel is complete.
I hope you enjoy reading "Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers."
Garrett
Cold and the Liberty Keepers
By
Stephen Russell
Introduction
Daybreak on Freelife Seven – ascending the naked
rocks of the Anglehorn Ridge, the red dwarf star’s first light arrives on a
fiery wind that promenades over the cliffs like a cavalry charge, striking the
iron-hard floor of the valley with such force that you swear you can hear it, a
sound that rings like the first blow of a sledge hammer on a steel anvil. Maybe
that’s why the softie Lords picked this place for the prison colony. Remote and
untamed, convict life either tempers or breaks those who dwell here.
On Freelife’s only
official holiday, SixKill Day, I watched from a ledge above the spaceport as dawn
painted crimson and gold swirls on a landing convict freighter. My sLOD boss
sent me to watch this particular landing because of the notoriety of one of the
convicts – Ella Cantor, a woman whose petite frame and innocent blue-eyed
debutante act hid one of the most vicious, sociopathic minds humanity had ever
seen fit to banish to the outer limits of hell. Not that any amount of genius
or insanity would make a bit of difference here on Freelife. No, the one dwarf
red star and seven bits of mostly uninhabitable rock circling it served the
ends of justice extremely well, providing the safety of almost complete
separation from the civilized softie worlds and the hard-fisted hand of
retribution, the blacksmith’s hammer of environmental stress and hard work that
would extract whatever value might remain in the lives of the convicts exiled
here.
I learned smithing from my grandfather, who had a ranch back on my home world, a place whose
name I’ll never purposely speak again. Grampa Cold taught me that the best work
depends on both the quality of the metal and the skill of the smith. True
blacksmiths understand that while bad metal might be forced into a particular
shape, it ultimately breaks under use, usually at the most inconvenient time. And
good metal, poorly handled, becomes like fruit picked too soon, either never
ripening or suddenly rotting so that nothing remains but to throw it away.
“Start with good metal, always, Garrett. And remember to swing for the anvil,
as if nothing else were there,” he told me over and again until I learned to
strike a thousand blows in a row, each the same as the one before regardless of
what shape or size of material I was working with. Consistently swinging for
the anvil, as if nothing but empty space exists between it and the hammer’s
head, is the secret to blacksmithing. You have to ignore the fact that the blow
will be interrupted by something other than the soulless hunk of scarred iron
fixed to the shop floor. That’s what makes good metal strong and breaks the bad
pieces before too much time or energy gets invested.
It was unusual for a
convict ship to land on Freelife Seven, where the Anglehorn Valley holds the
only city in the whole system, a mostly lawless frontier town called Leaveton.
In fact, to my knowledge, this was the only time in my ten years of service as
Deputy Marshall that such an event had occurred. Every other ship took up a
parking orbit around one of the five asteroids being mined by convict labor,
slaves actually, each man and woman owned by one or the other of a dozen sLOD
corporations who bid for the rights to every felon’s life work. The convict
ships, designed to haul the hundreds of millions of kilos and credits worth of
chemicals and minerals back to the softie worlds, arrived filled with
humanity’s cast-offs, ne’er do wells, and miscreants. Such was the new economy.
The ships also brought
food and medical supplies, the products that motivated all of us to work hard
and without complaint. Well, at least we didn’t ever complain where the sLOD
bosses could hear. SixKill Day existed to remind us all of that.
Thirty Standard Years
ago, a group of ambitious convicts, led by a former crime boss from one of the
better known softie worlds, organized a takeover of Freelife Six. At the time,
Freelife Six – a terra-formed masterpiece created under the most difficult of
conditions and engineered to raise all the food the million or so miners
working the five asteroids would ever need – served as the heart of this
self-contained punitive economy. She was a real beauty, a blue, green, and
white gem illuminated by the amber light of Freelife Zero, that’s the red
dwarf, the longest lived, most stable, and most prevalent star type in the
universe. Of course I only know Freelife Six from digi-images. The convict
rebels, and their naïve leader Rural Cagannor entertained the idea of escaping
their exile and returning to the softie worlds that had arrested, tried,
convicted and sentenced them. You never forget the words of your sentencing,
pronounced by a wigged judge, kinkies we call ‘em, in the formal language the
law so loves, “An’ ne’er shall ye return while thy heart pumps blood, thy lungs
draw breath, or thou walketh upright and amongst the living.” Freelife
sentences meant Life, period. No parole, no time off for good behavior, no
visitation privileges, or any communications from home, and as SixKill Day
reminds us all, no coercing one’s way out. It’s a one way trip with a short
life expectancy at the end of the ride.
A month after the
takeover, a softie assault ship dropped two-hundred warheads in all the right
places. The killing radiation eradicated all life on the planet in less than a
week. A new plan for feeding the convict population took effect immediately
after. We all live on imported rations, canned, processed, and mostly bland, except for liquor. The moonshine trade is brisk and for reasons that will become clear, largely tolerated. Softie Militiamen oversee every delivery and not a single pill, can,
or bag of food gets offloaded until the return cargo, extracted from the mines,
is inventoried, weighed, and certified as meeting the established quotas. In
other words, if we want to eat, we work, hard. We know what will happen if
there is any dispute over rations and quotas, or any evidence of Gangs or
Bosses. If such matters arise, they are resolved underground, out of view of
our sLOD masters.
So, today all
Freelifer’s will spend a few moments contemplating the dead world orbiting
black, barren, and forever untouchable. There was no warning, no negotiation.
The assault ship jumped into orbit, dropped her bombs, and jumped out in the
space of a Standard Hour. There are a handful of convicts still alive who were
working on Freelife Seven at the time. They tell what seem to me mostly
unembellished stories of the sudden radio silence as the EM Pulses from the exploding
bombs shut down everything powered on the whole planet. And they recall seeing
the digi-images circulated by the militiamen, showing the planet’s color change
from green/blue, to gray/brown, to black and white as a nuclear winter settled
over the whole world. They lower their eyes when they reach this part of the
story. You can see their mouths tighten. Some of these survivors lost friends
on that day.
And what about Freelife
Seven? Seven is the linchpin around which our little enterprise turns. If you
put all the most violent, and often creative, deranged, ambitious, and
narcissistic men and women of a huge interstellar civilization into hard labor,
for life, cut them off from everything
they have ever known or loved, and do this on isolated and barely habitable
planets, you've got to have a pressure relief valve. Just as the blacksmith
tempers newly forged metal by periodically plunging it into a cooling water
bath, the sLOD's provide periodic relief to the convict miners by shuttling
them over to Freelife Seven. It's a playground for hard cases. Clubs, gaming
halls, sports arenas, and all manner of deviant vices are for sale on Seven.
Convict pay isn't much, but a monetary system exists and credits above and
beyond food accumulate for good, steady workers. Leave to Seven is earned and I
suppose that is the key to Freelife not imploding.
“This is bad business,
Garrett,” my sLOD boss told me when he radioed the order for me to post myself
on the ledge for Ella Cantor’s arrival. “She’s got no business on Seven. They
ought to have put her in the mines.”
“Very few women in the
mines, your grace,” I said. “Most don’t last long.”
“Ella Cantor is the
sort of criminal that makes one rethink the whole death penalty question. And
those vacuum-headed kinkies who decided to bring her here on this day, of all
days…” his voice trailed off and there was a crackle of static so that I
thought the connection had dropped, a not uncommon problem for many reasons.
People weren’t supposed to live in this star system. Someday, Freelife Zero was
going to expel all of us. “I want you there, Garrett. Watch everything and
report back to me only when she is safely in the orientation hanger.”
So, I’d lost a night’s
sleep, climbing to the ledge where I now sat as the freighter settled onto the
landing pad. This was an old freighter; a leviathan compared to the smaller,
though still enormous, cargo haulers developed over the past decade. The newer
ships were far more secure, I thought, with only two openings, one for the crew
and one for the cargo. This monstrosity looked like a cultured cheese wedge
with all the doors, hatches, and docking bays set into its visible sides. I
watched through a pair of very old-fashioned binoculars, the optical kind with
no digital assist. They’d belonged to a militia man whose life I’d saved on two
occasions. Usually, a convict saving a militia man’s life was an accident. I’d
done it intentionally and he knew it, so he gave me the glasses. “Tell anyone
you saved me and I’ll flay you alive and bake your trimmings to jerky on the Anglehorn,
Cold. Got it?”
I thanked him for the
binoculars and made up a story as to how I came by them.
A squad of militia
scanned the ship while a Secure Prisoner Transport vehicle parked near the
largest of the visible bay doors. Soon, the squad of soldiers formed two
lines, weapons ready, a nasty wall of dispassionate firepower between
the transport and the bay door, which slowly opened.
Sunrise on Freelife
Seven takes a long time. Due to the tidal forces at play in the habitable zone
around such a small star, the planet takes five Standard Days to make a
complete rotation. Standard Time hearkens back to the Homeworld, the origin of
humanity, and is based on that ancient planet’s rotation and orbital periods.
What takes a Standard Hour there from the first gray light over the horizon to
the full revelation of the Homestar’s yellow disk takes nearly five hours on
Freelife Seven. And our star, though called a red dwarf, of course displays the
familiar blood-orange color as it begins its incinerating journey across our
amber sky. As slowly as the dawn breaks, it seemed to come all at once compared
to the raising of the bay door on Ella Cantor’s freighter. The tension in the
squad, fingers on triggers, safety’s off, palpable, like the tightness I felt
in my throat from the sulfurous dust that rose on the early morning wind. I
expected to see Ella Cantor, possibly in chains, definitely flanked by at least
four and probably six guards, walk painfully down the ramp. Deep space travel
is hard under the best of conditions. When making a cross-galaxy jump in the
hold of a freighter, with no acclimation time to the changes in light,
atmosphere, and gravity that assault the body at the end of the ride, many are
unable to walk unaided for several days.
Ella Cantor strode off
the ship alone, her blonde hair in an elaborate braid, wearing gray coveralls
with no pockets, her hands at her sides, unfettered, and as soon as she reached
the bottom of the ramp, she looked right, then left, and nodded. She might have
been shot in that moment, so nervous were the militiamen. But what was that nod
about? She crossed briskly to the transport and jumped inside without looking
back. Twenty-four rifles followed her every step of the way, every eye focused
on her, which is why they didn’t see the flash grenades tossed from inside the
freighter until they hit the ground and exploded, knocking the whole squad
senseless. I watched as six men, all carrying full packs, dashed down the ramp
and reached the transport just as the driver and his guard climbed down to
assist the militia men. Both were knocked cold by the first two men to reach
them at the same time my hand found the portable radio and keyed the mike.
By the time my sLOD
boss picked up, the transport was moving fast, north, away from the spaceport
and Leaveton, into the rocky canyons and inhospitable barrens of the Anglehorn.
To my surprise, the
boss was neither upset nor unsettled by my report. His voice, always with a bit
of edge in it, had the listless quality of someone reflecting on a pleasant
dream.
“North, you said? What’s
out there, Garrett?”
I shrugged. North of
Leaveton are deep canyons, sharp rocks, and very little water. When the prison
colony was established in the system, the plan had been to mine the planet as
well as the asteroids. It had been a costly and ultimately futile venture as
little of value was found anywhere except in the asteroids, which were a true
treasure trove of minerals and chemicals. Whatever value lay beneath the
surface of Freelife Seven, the current economy would not pay to discover.
“There’s nothing, your
grace, except a few abandoned mines.”
“Mines? What sort of
mines?”
“No one knows. They’re
from the very first days of the colony. Very unsafe. Nobody goes out there.”
Again I waited through
static filled silence. I could see some of the militia men starting to move,
recovering from the grenade effects. Evidently Ella Cantor’s only desire was
escape, though where she intended to go I could not imagine.
“Do you want us to go
after them, your grace?”
“No,” he said
instantly. “No, not now at least. Go back to town. Find out what you can about
how she was able to do this. Bad business decisions are only bad for one side
of the transaction. The kinkies will pay for this one, but I may yet profit
from it.”
I signed off and after
a final look at the freighter, now crawling with militia men, turned to begin my climb back down. To my dismay, I
didn’t finish the turn. Something large, heavy, and very hard hit me full in
the back and I once again had a moment to contemplate the slow dawn of Freelife
Seven as I seemed to take forever to lose my balance, thinking I might even
regain it for a moment before I felt the ground and my feet part company and I
began a long fall toward the boulder strewn floor of the Anglehorn Valley.
***
