This is the third installment of a serial novel I’m working on. Comments are moderated, but all that relate to the writing will be posted. My intention is to share a good story with you while getting feedback that will hopefully make it better. Please feel free to comment, knowing that I only delete spam.

 

If this is your first visit to Freelife, I strongly recommend you read the first two installments which were posted on February 1 and March 1.  The summary that follows is for those who need a quick reminder of the story so far.

 

Garrett Cold, banished for life to Freelife Seven, a prison planet orbiting a red dwarf star, witnesses the escape of a newly arrived female prisoner, Ella Cantor. Ordered by the corporate boss who owns him to find out who is helping her and to bring her back, he finds himself the center of a great deal of unwanted attention. On SixKill Day, the holiday commemorating the holocaust that put down the only riot ever to occur in the Freelife system, Garrett finds himself among drunk and angry militia troops in Bernie’s Roundhouse Tavern, a popular watering hole for convicts on leave from their mining jobs on the system’s asteroids. When he defends another prisoner from a vicious assault by the militia troops, he is beaten and nearly killed. A waitress in the bar, Tohoana, appeals to the female LT in charge of the rowdy troops to save Garrett who has been drugged by Tohoana for reasons that are as yet unclear. Garrett’s final recollection before being rendered unconscious by the drug is of being carried out of the bar, following a woman officer whose unique blond braid looks exactly like the one worn by Ella Cantor at the moment of her escape.

 

Garrett Cold and the Freedom Keepers

Chapter Two – Caduceus

            The last place I expected to awake from Tohoana’s drug-induced coma was in my cell, my rack, and alone, as if I’d simply fallen asleep after a hard day’s night of SixKill celebrating. I knew that wasn’t true. I’d been drugged and as I rubbed my eyes, trying to evict the headache hiding deep in their sockets, I discovered the red bandana symbolizing my office had gone missing.

            Amber light shot with red and gold streamed through the high slits that served as windows. At least I’d lived to see another dawn. The street below was strangely silent, or perhaps my hearing hadn’t yet returned from the unconscious world I’d inhabited after being carried out of Bernie’s. Following the riotous hedonism of the holiday, a sense of slowness, like a video played at half speed with the volume muted, generally ruled my perceptions of Leaveton for a few days, but this silence seemed deeper. I’d been unconscious a long time, at least a full local day. My head throbbed, and when I moved it felt as if every muscle and joint contained ground glass. Despite the thousand and one other questions threatening to crowd all reason from my mind, I needed to focus, to bring my attention out of the foggy mists, the residual vestments of Tohoana’s enforced sleep, and deal with a true life or death matter. I was dying of thirst.

            The most challenging phase of terraforming a planet revolves around the water supply. Without surface water, atmospheres quickly destabilize and vanish. Alkaline or acid soils affect water’s ability to sustain algae, plankton, and other forms of vegetation essential to having breathable air. A lack of reliable groundwater, filtered through layers of rock and accessible via pumps and springs near to population centers, made it impossible to establish self-sustaining colonies on newly discovered planets for many years after the development of faster-than-light travel. A couple of centuries ago, the sLOD Ravi Singepoor built a new bio-mechanical clarifier; the system revolutionized wastewater recycling, allowing production of a lukewarm translucent to opaque potable fluid called grey water, and opening the galaxy to human habitation.

Freelife is one of many planets utilizing Singepoor’s systems, circulating grey water via primitive pumps to the cells, stores, and clubs. The lack of transparency in the fluid, due to the release of oxygen molecules by nano-engineered protozoa, makes for an aesthetically displeasing, albeit sanitary drink, a taste for which can be acquired given time, say twenty Standard Years or so. Dying from lack, as in most things, overcame resistance. At this moment, this first return to consciousness, I thought a sip of grey water might be the closest thing a living being could get to ambrosia.

A simple tap, protruding through an inner wall of my cell, served as my nipple of life. Right now, its naked and unencumbered teat beckoned me from the most distant corner of the space.

            I tried to sit up and nearly blacked out again. The tap, situated near the fresher, looked to be a light-year away. Rolling from my rack to the floor, I crawled toward it, head throbbing, heart pounding, and unable to draw a full breath. My lungs felt as if they had been wrapped with inflexible wire mesh. When I reached the basin, I rolled on my back and stared up at the rusted bottom and aged, corroding pipes emerging from beneath the bowl.

The tap mounted a little over a meter up on the block wall might as well have been higher than the Anglehorn ledge from which I’d been booted. The thought of that drop, plunging through the honeyed air above the spaceport with only a worn climbing rope to prevent my abrupt and messy end, further disturbed me. I couldn’t be sure, not yet at least, but suspicion that the secret consequence of my past misdeeds had arisen from a long dormancy to throw me off a mountain side, gnawed away at my insides as a tunnel boring machine grinds away rock in a mine, only exposing a dark hollow of anxiety leading to fear rather than anything of use or value. The acute need for water only heightened this feeling.

            The most frequent cause of death for engineers on terra-forming assignments, other than decompression accidents, is dehydration. Grampa Cold nearly died in such an incident, long before I was born, on a remote moon of a distant gas giant when a freak solar flare knocked out his team’s power supply, redundancies and all; even their interstellar radios, normally all but indestructible, got fried. In the early days of terraforming it was common for teams to go for months without checking in with the folks back home – most priding themselves on wresting naked soil from the cold and soulless void and transforming it into a world suitable for human occupation. Unable to radio and with no one expecting to hear from them, their situation digressed rapidly, worsening from dire toward dangerous as their water rations dwindled from kiloliters to liters to drops. They ran out of water two-and-a-half days before a scheduled supply vessel arrived.

Six of the twelve team members were already dead due to radiation exposure, having been caught outside their shelter when the flare hit. Four others expired from dehydration and hyperthermia just hours before the ship landed. One man committed suicide, pulling the decompression valve on his suit while in the grip of desiccation induced dementia. Only Grampa survived, and that by luck. He took a strong sedative when he felt himself reaching the point of despair. His rescuers found him unconscious in his rack and revived him. He lost a kidney, damaged by toxins that formed in his bloodstream during the crisis.

In telling the tale, he never seemed bitter, just saddened by the death of so many comrades, like a war veteran coming home after a terrible defeat. It all happened long before I was born, but he told me the story when I asked about his surgical scars. The way my back hurt I wondered if I’d need a replacement organ or two, assuming I found a way to reach the tap, or would some anonymous militia grunt find me shriveled and dead. Why, when death came to call, did my delirious thoughts always turn to Amos Albert Cold?

            How long can a man live without water? Grampa would say “Until he’s dead,” or perhaps “S’long as’t takes.” No, he’d go with the former, believing that near-death experiences created holes in time, caused cessation of the tick-tick-tick of the beating of the clock that was the universe, while quantum possibilities flitted about like a swarm of fruit-flies over a basket of ripe bananas. I’d seen men die from exposure to vacuum during my time in the mines, almost always due to some catastrophic failure in their pressure suits. That was a swift, if messy, death. I’d never witnessed a man dying of thirst before, but I had a pretty good idea that I was currently getting a more intimate look than I needed or desired.

All in all, as the pounding in my head took on the tone of a mega-ton rock smasher and my joints grated like the scrapings of a dull blade over the ends of the long bones of my body, I’d rather be shoved out an airlock.

Cramps surged through my abdomen, while the large muscles in my legs and back contorted my body into an agonized arch. My tongue felt as if it had turned to flypaper, stuck up against my palate, and fire raged in my swollen throat. I started to roll over, hoping to use what strength I had to push up to my knees, or at least far enough to turn the tap on, when I again felt something large and heavy slam into me, this time from below as if a piston anchored in Ricardo’s fortune-telling shop had thrust a giant fist through the concrete and rebar separating our cells, thrusting me upwards to crack my head against the underside of the basin.

I fell back face down and might have died in that position when I heard a gentle rattling of my cell door followed a moment later by the whine of the hinges and the sound of footsteps rapidly crossing to me.

            “GC? GC… you missed breakfast again.” It was Digit, trespassing in my cell. “Four cycles in a row. You missed SixKill. The me-muh- militia kept coming. I never saw so many, close to twenty-thousand, and the wo-w-woman, the officer I told you about, she disap-p-peared. GC, you’re bleeding. Here now, I got you. Umph! What do you weigh, old Sod? Eighty or ninety kilos I’d guess. Give me some help here, GC. Got to get you up. Scalp wounds bleed heavier than others, did you know that? Three liters of plasma in the average human b-body. B-bleed you d-dry in a Standard Hour if it didn’t clot. That’s it, you’re almost there. Old Digit’s got you now. C-c-count it out, GC. GC?” He dumped me into the chair and began rummaging in a cabinet. “You have potato flakes, GC? They clot blood. Coagulation is better than hem-hem-hem… ah, shit, b-bleeding. Corn starch works too. D-d-damn you, GC, you missed breakfast again. Three liters of plasma, b-bleed you dry in an hour.”

            Finding neither potato flakes nor corn-starch – I don’t keep food in my cell – Digit grabbed a t-shirt from a pile on the floor and pressed it against my scalp.

            “Water,” I said, but in my weakened condition I expect it came out “Wa’ar.” Seeing my face, the gash above my left temple, my cracked and bleeding lips, the bruises on top of bruises everywhere skin showed through my tattered clothing, he nodded.

            “You do look like you’ve been in a w-w-war, GC. On the l-losing side, I might add,” pressing the t-shirt harder against my head.

“Wa-ter,” I said again, gritting my teeth and grabbing at his wrist with one hand, and pointing at my throat with the index finger of the other. He understood and got me on my feet, dragging me to my rack.

“Hold that cloth t-tight, n-n-now…” he said, pressing my palm against the t-shirt. My hand fell away as soon as he turned toward the basin but the bleeding had stopped. I’m a fast healer. At least I always have been. 

 Digit drew a pitcher from the tap and brought it to me. After he helped me to sit up, I started to gulp it. He pulled it away from me. “Take it slow, there, GC. Won’t do you any g-good if you p-p-puke. What h-hap-happened to you?”

            By the time I’d finished that pitcher and half of another, my headache had started to recede and serious thoughts of life beyond the present hour began to spontaneously emerge. I’d no idea where I’d spent the past hundred hours. He asked me twice more for an answer and I could only shake my head. For all I knew the world might have ended. That would at least explain the strange silence outside my still open cell door. The last thing I could remember was being carried out of Bernie’s at the start of the SixKill celebration. Digit paced while I drank, but presently he knelt beside me, a worried look deepening the lines on his ancient face.

            “GC, if you c-can’t say where you’ve b-b-been, that’s, that’s … f-f-f, ah, shit, f-f-f…” he stopped trying to form the word, studying my face, which was too exhausted to show anything like the disapproval he imagined. He pulled an ampule from a pocket, cracking and inhaling it, and didn’t speak again for several long moments as he waited for it to take effect. “First time I’ve forgotten since we last met, GC.” He was licking his lips and looking at my battered visage. “You’re saying that you don’t remember where you’ve been?

            I shook my head.

            “Must have been some party,” he said, looking back toward the still open cell door.

            “A hangover’d be better’n this,” I managed to answer, tossing the ruined t-shirt back in the heap on the floor.

            Digit seemed both interested and frustrated by this. “I don’t know what to believe GC. You all but threw me out at the start of SixKill, even after I told you about Tiny disappearing and all…” he grew silent, chewing his lower lip as he looked wide-eyed around the room. “He’s dead you know.”

            “Yes, I know.” I continued to sip at the water, still fighting cramps but feeling better with each passing moment.

            “When they found his body, I came looking for you, GC. More times than even I can count. You weren’t here. You weren’t here. You were gone. More times than even I can count.”

            “I don’t believe that.”

            He remained adamant, “I came by every day to see if you’d returned. Looking for your wheels, you know? And then today, your scooter was back. And I was coming up the stairs when I heard a crash. What was that crash, GC? Where were you?”

I tried to look at him, but he’d paced back toward the door and was looking out at something or someone. The streets were too quiet. Turning my head to follow him sent waves of nausea and pain to all four quarters of my being.

When he came back to stare down at me, his face was sad. I might have wondered why it mattered to him. A high-functioning savant, that’s what he was. And I was a tool for him just as he was for me. You don’t really have friends on Freelife. There are those who help you to get on and those you’d best avoid. That’s it. “Where you went, well, don’t tell me if you can’t but GC, you shouldn’t just disappear like that.”

            Puzzled at Digit’s outpouring of anxiety and what seemed to be genuine concern, I tried to mentally verbalize an impression of him. He’d always been a bit of a simpleton in matters not concerned with accounting and number theory, an abstract speaker prone to rambling in his good natured way. But now he seemed on the verge of tearing out what little hair he had left for worrying about me.

            “I didn’t plan to disappear, Digit” I coughed and turned up the empty water pitcher. He took it and waited for me to speak again. I waved at the tap and he brought me more water.

“Forty liters of water in the average human male. Twenty-five liters of intercellular fluid. Fifteen liters extracellular. Three liters plasma…” I knew Digit well. After taking an ampule his mind went to its natural state, calculating, counting, and listing numbers. When he was agitated, it took the form of vocalizations. At least he wasn’t stuttering. Without his work, toting up casino accounts, seeking irregularities in the bookkeeping, he’d go on listing random statistical elements lodged in his prodigious memory until exhaustion overtook him.

“Digit, stop.” He looked at me and again I saw the sadness. A breeze sent a sulfurous dust cloud in through the open door. I wondered why he hadn’t closed it. “Something, well at least I think it was something, something bad did happen at the spaceport, just like you guessed. I might be caught up in it, but I don’t even know for sure what ‘it’ is.” I drank the water while Digit sat on the edge of my rack, moving his fingers, eyes closed, as he worked out some mathematical problem that had arisen as a result of our conversation thus far.

            “Your scooter was gone, GC. You weren’t here. It rained you know. Nearly all through SixKill. That transport, goddamn FTL ships operating in atmosphere. What a waste. It rained almost forty hours. And lightning. Forty hours of SixKill in a shelter. I couldn’t stand it. I came out in the lightning to find you. And you were gone. Now you’re back, and so is your scooter. You say you don’t remember where you’ve been. Not very convincing, even to a low level accountant.” His face showed something. My eyes suddenly zeroed in on his expression. Disbelief, betrayal, almost a pout at being excluded from whatever I’d been up to – how could I make him understand? I didn’t know any more than he did. Where had I been?

            I sat up, feeling almost well enough to stand unaided. Water truly is miraculous, even the grey sludge with its oily feel, smoky metallic taste, and sometimes gritty residue that we drink here on Freelife Seven. I was looking around the cell for clues as to what might have occurred since I’d been carried out of Bernie’s following a blonde braid and an authoritative voice that I thought for sure intended to split me open simply to watch me bleed out. Three liters of plasma, Digit said. I rubbed my hands tentatively up my sides, bruised ribs aching beneath even the lightest touch, but nothing broken. I took a look around the cell, which appeared mostly undisturbed. I saw my radio, placed on a low counter along one wall. I wondered who had put it there and if they’d spoken with my sLOD boss. The trunk where my climbing gear was stowed had the lock secured through the hasp. There was the usual mess of clothes, both washed and unwashed, in a jumble next to the door to the fresher. As far as I could tell, whoever had gotten me home had dumped me in my rack and left, ignoring the contents of the cell. I lay back and shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans, feeling my right hand close around the shattered remains of my radio. My radio. My radio – was on a countertop across the room.

            “Digit, something’s happened here. Something dangerous.”

            His face alive with concern, he leaned over to look at the ruin I held. As a casino auditor working with some of the most ingenious con-men and women to ever collect a debt, honest or coerced, Digit knew when something wasn’t quite right. Now, as he looked at the broken pieces in my hand, and then following my gaze, saw the brand new, identical appearing model on the counter, a strange sort of light came over his face. He practically leapt across the room, grabbing up the radio and brought it back to me. I tossed the broken unit aside, keyed the switch on the new one and waited.

            “Garrett?” The sLOD boss’s voice filled the room after only a brief pause, clear as if he were sitting with us.

            “Your grace.”

            “You’ve been a long time reporting back. Everything okay there?”

            I wondered how long the boss had been trying to reach me and what, if anything, he thought about my situation. Convicts know very little about the people who own them. I might know more than most, or I might know nothing at all except a carefully orchestrated and consistently applied fiction, with the sLOD as senior puppeteer.  For all I knew he could have a thousand convicts in his control, scattered throughout the system, organized in some grand scheme the object of which was simply profit, and the cares of someone like myself or the others trapped in this hellish life didn’t amount to a hill of beans, or some such cinematic reference, while he sat snug and pampered in a suite of luxury offices in the great orbiting ring of a space station just outside the furthest asteroid’s orbit. He might not even be a living entity, but just a sophisticated digital intelligence – another machine working for an unseen organizing force of power and greed beyond my understanding.

Settling us on the most primitive of terra-formed worlds with nothing to reference against, no verifiable information from outside the system, made it possible for the sLOD who owned us to manipulate reality, to make us think anything that suited their purposes. I’d thought this through numerous times, but it came to me again as I looked at the two radios. Against the backdrop of man’s expansion into galactic space and all it entailed, a beating and a broken radio really did seem insignificant. What use were we really to our masters? I thought that if I worried about it long enough I might even understand why SixKill happened, what impetus caused the cons of that dead generation to rebel against unbeatable forces. Was it a mass suicide rather than a cold, calculated murder?

            “Everything is nominal, your grace. I’m just a little under the weather.”

            “Ah, SixKill and moonshine. You and most of the others in the system I imagine. Well, at least we got through this one without losing any significant infrastructure, and losses among the convict population were less than our projections, within acceptable limits, I mean to say. I suppose we have the weather to thank for that.” There was a long static-free pause, uncomfortable in more than one way for both of us. “Of course we hate to lose any of our resources,” he said. Despite the clarity of the signal from the new radio, I couldn’t tell whether he meant that. The new radio. No static, tuned exactly to the right frequency. No static. I had a very uneasy feeling. He didn’t mention the radio at all. To me, that indicated he might not know about it. The signal at his end might be cleaned up by a filter before reaching him no matter what sort of radio the sender used. The boss was talking. “So, what about your assignment? Any clues as to how she did it, or who might have helped her?”

            My mind circled back to what he said, “…losses among the convict population were … within acceptable limits.” As far as I knew, the only place the sLOD could learn that was from me. Nobody else seemed to be counting, and I’d had a lot of years to watch. The sLOD never came near the planet. There were no digi-cams here, strictly verboten upon penalty of an accidental chance to see how long you could hold your breath in space. But the boss knew the mortality figures from SixKill. He said they were less than expected. Was it a slip or was he telling me indirectly that there really was no meaning to my existence, not anymore, that the tasks I performed for him were simply repetitious exercises with no real purpose? And what about Ella Cantor? Who else had been on a distant ledge watching the landing of the transport? For all I knew she might be caught or dead already. Or she could just be an actor, a militia soldier conscripted to play a part for my benefit. Hell, for all I knew, this whole thing might be taking place in the hold of a hospital ship, with me strapped to a gurney and juiced full of hallucinogenic soma-drugs. “Get a grip boy,” I heard a familiar voice from the past reaching up from a darker pool of my memory.

            “I’ll have something for you soon, your grace. I’m sorry. Right now I’m just not doing too well.”

            “Go see the medics, Garrett. Gluttony sector was resupplied most recently. I’ll tell them to expect you.”

“It’s not that serious, your grace. I’ll shake it off.”

“Garrett, it’s been one hundred twenty-one hours since she disappeared. I want to find her alive, but first, I need to know who’s helping her and how. For that, I need you. Do you understand?”

“What about the militia? Digit tells me…”

“The militia lost her, Garrett. This surge only further confuses matters and it agitates the population, both in the garrison and in the cells. It’s an overreaction and as bad for business as bringing Ella Cantor to that planet in the first place. You find her, Garrett, and you find out how she pulled off that bit of illusion at the spaceport. All right?”

            “Yes, I understand, your grace. I’ll be in touch.”

            The sLOD boss signed off with a distinctive click. The radio felt warm.

            “No static,” Digit said, looking at the radio I held as if it might leap out at him any moment. I nodded, wanting to drop the thing. Despite its slim, rectangular design, it felt like a live serpent in my hand – one whose venom-dripping fangs were about to sink into my wrist.

            Despite the implications of what the boss said, that being the disappearance of Ella Cantor had drawn a lot of attention to our backwater prison, the kind of attention that threatened whatever shaky stability the past thirty years had bred, a far more immediate matter required what little energy I had. I looked toward Digit who had stood slack-jawed to one side of me, his eyes fixed on the radio in my hand. “This is a problem,” I said.

            Digit nodded. Someone had given me a new radio. A radio not subject to static interference, which all interplanetary radios built since the dawn of the last millennium had suffered from. This wasn’t an interplanetary radio. It had an extra wafer installed in its center. A few billion qubits held in a quantum field made it warm with use as the transdimensional containment field silently worked to preserve the dual-state of the entangled particles that made FTL communication across almost infinite distance possible. I didn’t understand all of the physics behind it, but I did know this radio was a one way ticket to the cold vacuum for any convict caught with it. Yet the boss didn’t seem to notice. I looked at my door and Digit got up to close it and secured the lock. I wondered if there were still militia around outside of Ricardo’s, the fortune-teller who inhabited the cell and shop below mine. A big surge with the holiday over would leave an excess of militia with a lot of free time. Even a moderately alert and mildly intoxicated soldier might have overheard my conversation with the boss, and the flawless signal that made it seem as if the boss was sitting at my side instead of halfway across the Freelife system. But the streets remained silent. No tread of jack boots reverberating up the metal stairwell leading to the landing outside my door. Yet the militia population, if Digit could be believed, had tripled, quadrupled even.

            Time to decide, boy. All in, again.

I needed to get rid of this radio and do it in such a manner it would never be found. I’d think of a story to tell the boss when and if he contacted me again. I’d never before lost or broken a radio. Every couple of years, during one of the inspections the militia hauled me in for, it was simply replaced with a newer model, but my current radio, the one broken on SixKill Day, was only six Standard Months old. Without the contraband radio, I’d be out of touch with the boss until he reached out to me.

Decide, boy. Then live with it. I jerked my head around, sending a shock of pain all down my spinal column that echoed through my ribs. “Gramps?” I said aloud. I was losing my mind. Decide, boy. It had to be done. There was no question of my getting through a militia inspection with this radio.

            “My Scooter, it’s out there?”

            Digit nodded, his face had grown pale and he took another ampule. I could see his lower lip trembling. I suspected his curiosity had been sated by the presence of the radio. I was still too weak to go anywhere, but I had to dispose of or at least hide the thing someplace where it couldn’t ever be traced to me. You might think such places would be easy to find in the labyrinthine streets of Leaveton, but I knew better. Almost the first lesson I learned upon my arrival in the system was the difficulties inherent in hiding nearly anything, but especially something expensive or incriminating, from the militia troops. I needed to get the radio out of town, and take it someplace where even if it were found, no tie to me could be proved. A tall order to be sure, given that it was keyed to the boss’s personal channel, and despite its appearing identical to the one now lying smashed on the floor beside me, one had only to depress the key and the absence of the crackle that never stopped would betray me. Still, I knew a place I might get rid of it, and perhaps find out more about Ella Cantor at the same time.

            “I want you to wait here, Digit, while I get rid of this thing. Watch when I leave and see if anyone follows me. If they do, get out of here, and don’t tell anyone you saw me today.” He was already shaking his head and avoiding my eyes. His hands clenched and unclenched and a sheen of sweat appeared on his forehead. I hated to press him now, but if he wasn’t going to help me, then I’d have to consider what to do with him. That was a subject I desperately wanted to avoid. He held my life in his head, in a manner of speaking and sooner or later I’d need to come to terms with that. At the same time, he’d just saved me from a very unpleasant death, although I was surprised at how quickly I’d seemed to recover. Adrenaline most likely along with some other factors that I’d not thought of for years, but which had suddenly decided to revisit me with no warning. It made me think back to the days before I was a convict, not yet even arrested. I didn’t want to think about those days ever again, but from the moment I’d gotten knocked off the ledge, there was room for little else in my mind despite my conscious efforts to deny the all too apparent truth. Sooner or later, I’d have to deal with that as well.

            Still shaky on my feet, I looked up at Digit’s frightened face. Sorry, Digit, I thought. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it does me. At least I think it will.

            “Look, Digit, listen to me. Everyone knows you come around to see me on SixKill every year. You said it yourself; you’ve been here too many times to count of late. That means if I get caught with this thing…”

“Interstellar Radio transceiver-receiver, forbidden except to captains of transports and militia personnel and then only when off planet. Model YZQ-013013X, manufactured by the Thac…”

“Stop, Digit.” I moved close to him, looking him in the eye. “If they catch me, you’re going to get hauled in too. Do you really think the militia will believe any story you might tell them? The first thing they’ll do is take your meds. Then they’ll lock you in a tiny cell next to an airlock, probably on one of the shuttles, opening and closing it every so often just to remind you how short the space between living and dying really is. When you can’t talk anymore, can’t even breathe without stuttering, and you’re completely convinced that the next time the airlock opens it will be so they can toss you out of it, they’ll give you an amped-up pill and question you about the radio. And nothing you say will they believe. Nothing.”

            He didn’t argue. Just gave me a look of terminal sadness and shook his head.

            “When they finish torturing you, and that will have been the only purpose of your so-called interrogation – to let a few of the higher-ups get their rocks off on your misery—understand me Digit, they’ll stand you next to that airlock, blindfolded, and tell you to count backwards from ten. Before you’re half done the doors will whoosh open and that whoosh will be the next to last sound you ever hear. Know what the last will be?”

            He was visibly shaking now. Just another sentence and I’d know if he would cooperate or not.

            I made a long mournful sound, puffing my cheeks and opening my eyes as wide as I could while grabbing at my throat.

            “Stop it, stop it, stop…no….” He let out an anguished moan. Digit had a bad first day in the system. Forty-eight convicts went through orientation and survival skills with a sadistic militia LT who half-trained them in putting on pressure suits before giving them six minutes to do it on their own after which he opened an elevator airlock in one of the mines on Freelife One. Twenty-five of the convicts didn’t have their suits on right and died screaming right in front of Digit. He’d gotten the drill right, sealing his suit in four minutes and eighteen point one three seconds according to his recounting, but the experience remained as real to him two decades later as if it had just happened. He was convinced he’d die awake and screaming just like that. Probably at the present moment, he wished he’d never told me about it.

            I looked at him, waiting, as his face suddenly turned hard, that fleeting look of betrayal I’d seen earlier now blossoming like a child caught rifling its mother’s intimate apparel.

            “GC, I…” before he finished a loud knock on the door caused both of us to start. I still had both radios in my hand. Motioning to Digit to remain silent, I summoned up all the strength I had, and fueled by a combination of fear and an inexplicable desire to keep breathing, even in the sulfurous air of this hellhole, stumbled across the room and into the privy closet where I dumped the shattered pieces of the broken unit through the port. When they found it, recovering it from the trap in the primitive septic system, I’d tell them it was broken during SixKill and I’d tried to flush it to avoid having to pay for it, or a better lie if I could come up with one. There was no doubt that it would be found if my cell got tossed. “Stupid, newmeat. Privy’s the first place we look for valuables,” I’d learned from a militia cadet during my orientation days in the mines. Of course, the only chance any story had of working would be to get rid of the other radio first.

            Time becomes fluid when death calls. “Garrett, you’ll see your way clear and live t’fight another day if y’learn that lesson,” Grampa said more times than I could recall. I scanned the cell. My rack, the trunk containing my climbing gear and a few other necessities for my duties to the sLOD boss, the basin and tap, the fresher with its attendant clumps of clothing, a counter along one wall where my few personal possessions lay, open shelves on the opposite side of the room empty but for socks and an unworn pair of convict coveralls, the repurposed shuttle chair, and Digit. Nothing else to see. The only openings consisted of the window slits, set close to the stained ceiling, without ledges, and the door, which visibly shook under impatient knocking from the other side.

            I motioned to Digit, who looked like he’d already been pushed out an airlock into infinity, to come help me, feigning that I was too ill to walk unaided. I was standing next to the privy closet. When he got near I grabbed him, clamped a hand over his mouth, and pushed him into the closet. I hoped I hadn’t killed him when I slammed his head against the block wall twice and left him unconscious on the floor. I emptied the pitcher on his face and the front of his coveralls, and left him with an arm over the seat and his head facing the disposal port below.

            The knocking had become constant and I could hear shouting from the other side of the door but I had one task left. Dropping the incriminating radio into the metal pitcher I’d been drinking from, I stuffed a grey t-shirt in on top of it. The shirt and radio filled the bottom third of the pitcher. I then set both in the basin and filled the pitcher with grey water, pressing the shirt down when it started to float. Once it was fully saturated, it disappeared in the murky fluid. I topped the pitcher off and carried it with me as I crossed to open the door.

            At least I didn’t have to fake feeling ill. The efforts of the past few moments sapped most of whatever strength I had and I nearly fell as the door pushed inwards and three men in militia uniforms entered my cell.

            “Garrett Cold,” the first said, wearing the twin circles of a captain, above a caduceus – the serpent entwined staff that from ancient times has served to identify physicians in nearly all cultures – on his flawless beige uniform. I nodded and moved aside, looking at the two privates accompanying him. This pair, in full riot gear, faces anonymous under helmets with visors, took up positions on either side of the door while the captain took a slow walk around the cell. Poking at my bloody t-shirt with the toe of his boot, he stopped at the closed privy door and gave me a questioning look.

            “Go ahead, open it. Friend of mine’s in there, got some bad moonshine during SixKill, I suppose. He’s out cold.”

            The captain stepped back as one of the privates crossed the room to open the door and shine a light inside. I set my pitcher on the ledge and sat on my rack, studying the other man who remained at the door, his truncheon in hand, watching me.

            “This man needs medical attention,” the captain said over the private’s shoulder.

            “Take him if you like,” I replied. “Won’t do no good, though, and you know that as well as me. He’ll live or die. Damn Freelife moonshine. No standards.”

            “And you?” the captain asked, closing the privy door and leaving Digit where he lay. “What’s ailing you?”

            “Same thing, I suppose. Woke up with a headache and thirsty like to be near dead. I’m trying to rehydrate,” I gestured toward the pitcher, hearing Grampa’s advice from some long ago lesson, “You want to hide something, Garrett, and you think you’re smart enough to do it, then the best place is in plain sight. Right under the noses of those that you believe foolish enough to be deceived.”

            The captain looked at the grey, slightly foaming liquid in the pitcher, sniffed it and dipped a finger in. Rubbing finger and thumb together as he crossed to stand over me, he nodded.

            “Seems you had quite a holiday, Deputy Marshall.”

            “How’s that?” I avoided his eyes, watching the other two, who seemed more and more familiar the longer I looked at them.

            “At Bernie’s, I mean.” That got my attention. “Seems you had a bit of a run-in with some of the men from the garrison. Newbies on their first tour from what I understand, which brings me to the purpose of this visit.”

            “It was completely my fault, sir. I deserved to get my ass kicked. I know how hard those boys work protecting…”

            “Let’s not play games, Marshall. Let’s not pretend that there is even a possibility of you feeling responsible for the death of inmate Hallowell, or not feeling furious at the behavior of the men who tortured and killed that unfortunate creature.”

            “Tiny? He’s probably better off dead. I was talking about the service, about the garrison and how hard it must be for those boys having to babysit a bunch of animals because the government can’t get it in their heads that the whole universe would work better if we were all dead instead of taking up resources on these rocks. But then again, since there don’t seem to be any significant wars to fight, not with the sLOD in charge, I suppose something has to exist for the boys to let off steam. The sLOD are probably willing to accept a few losses, given that need. And I was disrespectful, not intentionally, you understand, but all the same…” It was the longest speech I’d ever been allowed to give to a militia man and I was frankly running out of things to say. Fortunately, the captain interrupted with a wave of his hand.

            “Enough, just stop and listen to me for a moment.”

            I was flummoxed. Yep, that’s the right word. This officer, who if he wanted, could have me transported out to any of the asteroids or simply jettisoned on the way there and no one would likely even know, let alone care, at least no one still legally a human, was talking to me like an equal. I looked again at the caduceus, the staff of Hermes from the oldest times, with twin asps intertwined around a balled rod. Maybe he was a psy-doc, playing a new head game. Flummoxed me as to why though.

            “The men who roughed you up were first-timers to Freelife. That they arrived during the SixKill surge was an unfortunate circumstance for all concerned. But what we’re interested in is their commanding officer.”

            “The LT?” I said, the words escaping before I could slam my mouth shut.

            “That’s right. So you saw this…” he paused as if the right word might make all the difference in whether he got what he wanted from me or not, “…this imposter.”

            They tried to hide it, but I saw the two guards flinch, their weight subtly shifting from one foot to the other though you’d need to have studied men in low gravity for years, as I have, to really catch it, even looking right at them.

            “Imposter you say?” I cleared my throat.

            The captain nodded. He looked at my pitcher.

            “Would you care for some more water, Marshall?”

            “Call me, Garrett,” I said, “And no, I better pass. At least until my friend gets out of the privy. I’m afraid I’ve developed some bladder weakness over the years. Moonshine, you know. You help yourself if you want some though.” Right in plain sight, I heard Grampa laughing. The pause that followed was uncomfortably long. Finally, he shook his head.

            “No thanks, Garrett. But I appreciate the offer,” he said. I almost choked. This clown was trying to build rapport and he’d seriously considered having a drink out of that pitcher just to get closer to me.

“Suit yourself, I said, wondering if I really wanted to know what this visit was about. “So, you saw the LT, then?”

            “Only briefly. She, ah, it was a she, right?” He nodded. “She was in the shadows most of the time. Just barkin’ orders like a regular, one that was used to giving commands.”

            “She was very convincing, even to experienced militia troops. Boarded outside the system just before the last jump. Everything in order with her docs. Lieutenant Sheila Lasserhagen – now I’m not supposed to tell you that, as you well know, but since you may have been the last person to see her…”

            I shook my head and stared at the floor.

            “I never saw her face. Someone drugged me, if you don’t already know, probably saved me from ending up like Tiny. The LT intervened; I’ve no idea why, and she had a bunch of the newbies carry me off. All I saw of her was a blonde braid bobbing ahead of me before I blacked out. I just woke up a little while ago, in my rack, with no memory of anything else. I haven’t seen or heard from her or anyone else.”

            “Other than your unfortunate friend in the privy.”

            The man was paying close attention, hearing every word I said. As he listened, a crease formed between his eyebrows and his lips tightened into a line beneath his thin mustache. I took him to be about forty-five Standard, he might be older than that, but softies age slower than convicts, at least that’s how it seems to me, and time dilation effects of interstellar travel preserve militia lifers as well as near-absolute zero storage.

I’d said a lot, probably more than was good for me, but the only way to keep them talking was for me to talk, and besides, the longer I talked freely, the less likely they would be to use other methods to extract what they wanted from me.

            “I hate this planet, Garrett. Do you know why? Don’t answer. I’ll tell you. I hate this planet because the sLOD’s and the kinkies – those untouchable geniuses who wouldn’t know the top from the bottom of a pressure suit and don’t have to because they pay others to do all of the work that requires such knowledge – haven’t seen the necessity to provide even the simplest surveillance technologies in this system. You know that, right?”

            I nodded. I thought I’d worked all of that out long ago. We’re non-humans, forgotten and banished. No need to keep tabs on us so long as the cargo comes back to softieland every quarter. If it doesn’t, our food ration is cut until we make up the shortfall. Neat and simple. No need for expensive technology. If convicts die, just toughen things up in the courts so you have more convicts. Too many convicts? Arrange with the militia and the mining bosses for a few more accidental deaths. I had it in my head that was how this economy worked. This wasn’t a penal colony; it was a business, a for-profit business. Of course Digit’s theory that there were far more profitable ways to both deal with convicts and mine asteroids completely negated all of my ideas, but my way of seeing it was somehow more comforting. Freelife got wild and wooly at times, but freedom of sorts was an essential component of day-to-day existence here.

            “So all you have on this LT, what was her name again?”

            “Lasserhagen.”

            “Odd name, but not very memorable…all you have on her activities here is what eyewitnesses can tell you?” He nodded, still frowning as he looked around the cell. When his eyes rested again on the pitcher I spoke up. “Do you mind if ask why the militia sent a medical captain to ask questions that seem more properly in the purview of the intelligence branch?”

            The captain turned immediately to the two privates, now standing at bored ease on either side of the cell door.

            “Sometimes I think our militia doesn’t truly have an intelligence branch, Garrett. The truth is, your sLOD boss has been hounding us for three Standard Days to find you. By us, I mean the people that the garrison commander reports to; people who you’d think couldn’t be bothered with whether or not one out of line convict got roughed up by drunken soldiers on leave.”

            I suddenly felt like I was in an airlock, looking out at the bottomless hole of space. The captain’s words, if true, made me seem a lot more important and a lot more visible than I’d cared to be since my arrest and trial. I’d truly hoped to just do my job, lie low on Freelife for as long as I lived, and hope that Grampa and the rest of those I’d left behind learned something from my mistakes. It’s a simple, stupid kind of dream, I suppose, but I dared not aspire to more. I saw what happened to the truly ambitious, the powerful, and the crazy when they came here, stripped of everything, and tried to matter in a world that didn’t exist as far as the softies were concerned. Death knocked often for those who couldn’t simply let go and fit in. Despite the overwhelming sense of danger I felt at the captain’s revelation, another sensation took its first breath in the womb of my consciousness, one related to the two wallops in the back from a seemingly invisible force – it was excitement, a sense of life, of purpose beyond survival. The universe was a big place. Five asteroids, one dead and one barely living planet orbiting an utterly insignificant star that might incinerate the lot of us at any time suddenly seemed like it might not be enough. I lay back in my rack and crossed my hands behind my head so the captain wouldn’t see them shake.

            “We got orders this morning, very early, to get out here and see if you were alive. When the brass finally connected you with the unfortunate circumstances at Bernie’s…”

            “It wasn’t unfortunate circumstances, captain. It was outright murder.” He said I didn’t have to pretend. I decided to test him. “Tiny’s mental capacities were like an infant’s. He had no comprehension of what life was really about. I have no idea what crime got him sent here, and I don’t care to, but I suspect that it might have been that nobody wanted to deal with his ...” I stopped. What was I doing? “I’m sorry, captain. I’m way out of line, again.”

            “It’s okay, Garrett. You’re right about what happened at Bernie’s, or you would be except the law doesn’t recognize murder unless a human is killed.” He left the rest unspoken. A human. A whole planet of former humans had died on SixKill under the auspices of the law. What was a few hundred more a year? Or one lonely, obese, emotional cripple’s death for the amusement of drunk and disorderly soldiers? I nodded. It wasn’t my fight or the captain’s. “There is a small consolation, Garrett. If you’ll allow it.”

            I sat up as the two privates, after a moment’s hesitation removed their helmets and stood facing me. It was Morrischenko and Post, the two assholes who’d invited me into their fun house of horrors. They were younger than I remembered, just boys. Sober, they almost looked like decent fellows.

            I trust only one person in the whole universe. His name is Garrett Cold. He’s the one who has kept me alive for the past three-and-a-half decades. The sLOD boss keeps me around for some enigmatic reason or reasons that I don’t see any point in trying to understand. I trust him as long as I can see that what I’m doing serves him. But even that criterion has lately come into question. As surprising as it might seem, I never trusted Grampa. Amos Albert Cold used me to fulfill some personal ambition, namely raising a survivor no matter what the conditions. Any of his experiential lessons might have killed me. The fact none did was, I suspected, due more to my own inherent wish to live than to his skill as a teacher. Not that he could help himself. It was in his nature to do what he did’ he was a man who created habitable worlds out of eternally lifeless stone. Tohoana, well, I might have trusted her once upon a time. And Digit. I now knew what the look of betrayal on his face was about. He knew the militia were looking for me. He might have even led them to my cell. And I suspected it wasn’t just this morning that they’d gotten the order. The sLOD aren’t known for patience. Someone else might make inquiries in the early stages of an operation, but when the sLOD calls on the militia, it’s to give orders that had best be followed immediately, not to increase the pressure over a period of days. So, I trust me and me alone; keeping the list that short has thus far served the only cause I can truly call my own – staying alive for one more day.

            “Hello, Marshall,” Post said, none of the arrogance or drunken swagger in his voice. I had to give the militia credit, they instilled discipline in the front line and when they needed it, it held. Morrischenko nodded in greeting, trying to keep his face neutral. What I saw surprised me. Fear. “We’ve come to apologize for how things turned out at Bernie’s. So, um, I’m sorry.”

            “Me too,” Morrischenko echoed.

            I looked at the captain who was alternately watching all three of us. What could I say? I burst out laughing. I’d fallen into a surrealist hallucination. I was still under the influence of whatever Tohoana had rubbed into me. I’d hit my head so hard against the basin after the last belt to the back that I was in a delirium, getting my most ludicrous wishes in the form of believable visions before slipping away to a coma and death. Anything but the plain fact in front of me. They were here. They were sorry. There was an officer present to confirm it. What did they want?

            The captain nodded and Morrischenko continued, “We’d like to talk to you about what you said before blacking out. About the prisoner who escaped.”

            Finally, something that made sense. I waited. This involved the sLOD boss. It didn’t require an answer and it carried lots of risk to give one.

            “You said it was our fault,” Morrischenko said, looking at me now but still with fear in his eyes. “You were talking about a prisoner who came in on the freighter at the start of SixKill. How did you know that?”

            “How did you know it?” I answered the safest way I knew how

Morrischenko’s face flashed a hint of the disdain I’d seen at Bernie’s. He looked to the captain who gestured for him to continue. Post shifted his weight. He was growing impatient with this charade, I could see it in his eyes and the slow flush of his face.

            “We, Post and I, and a lot of others were sent to search the ship after it happened.”

            I remembered seeing the squads of militia combing the freighter in the early red light while the stolen transport vehicle raced away into the wastes north of Leaveton. The mystery grew with each revelation. The LT, Sheila Lasserhagen, had a blonde braid just like Ella Cantor. It occurred to me that she might be Ella Cantor, but that would mean Ella had to be in two places at the same time – commanding a squad on Freelife Seven and jumping over from the far end of the galaxy to begin serving time in the same place.

            “I’ll tell you what you want to know if you answer one question for me.”

            The captain studied me for a moment, like a man whose dog has suddenly learned to talk. “All right, Garrett, ask.”

            “How long has Sheila Lasserhagen been on planet?”

            It was the Captain who immediately answered. “Fifteen Standard Days. Like these two, she was in the first surge unit sent for SixKill.”

            I processed this for a moment. It was still possible, if Sheila was resourceful enough to sneak into a secure garrison in a position of command and remain undiscovered for half a Standard Month, she might be able to get away, jump back across the galaxy and return on the freighter to escape as Ella Cantor. I wasn’t a physicist so the intricacies of time distortion in FTL travel weren’t readily available to me. Perhaps when Digit came around I’d get some answers from him in that arena. But it seemed possible, however remotely that Ella and Sheila were the same person. That opened up a whole other realm of possibilities, most of them involving deception on the part of my sLOD boss. It was uncomfortable but didn’t seem dangerous at the moment. There had been plenty of time to kill me over the past hundred hours. No, they wanted something from me. What had I gotten mixed up in?

            “My sLOD boss ordered me to watch the landing. To make sure the prisoner made it safely to orientation and then report back to him.”

            Post smirked, “Seems like you failed then, Marshall. She ain’t been to orientation yet.” A hard look from the captain shut him up.

            They didn’t press me for any further details. The sLOD boss being in the mix seemed to quell their curiosity for the moment. The captain let his eyes wander around the cell once more, coming to rest on my locked chest.

            “May we have a look in there, Marshall?”

            “Sure, it’s just my climbing gear.”

            “You keep it locked?”

            “There’s some here wouldn’t mind at all if I fell off the Anglehorn. The lock keeps any of them from tampering with my ropes, at least without me knowing it. Besides, the gear was a gift from my sLOD boss.” Eyebrows raised all around the cell.

            Lots of folks on Freelife know about my passion for climbing. Militia have seen me scaling the rocks near the garrison. There was nothing incriminating in having climbing gear, after all, I couldn’t use it to escape to another star system. I unsteadily crossed to the chest. The lock was a simple one, three numeric dials that went from one to thirty. When I grasped the lock it fell open before I set a single number.

            “Something wrong, Marshall?” Post asked, with just a trace of arrogance in his voice as I stared dumbfounded at the open lock in my hand.

            “Someone has been in here,” was all I managed to say before he and Morrischenko pulled me roughly back, knocking me to the ground.

            “Easy fellows,” the captain said, standing and crossing to stand between me and the two soldiers. I had visions of the trunk lid coming up and instead of a bag of climbing gear there would be a dozen Interstellar Radios, all squawking my name as voices from my past began a crescendo in my once more pounding head. “Garrett Cold, Garrett Cold, Garrett Cold, Garr…” The vision was interrupted by the captain picking up my water pitcher. “Think I will have a bit of this after all.” He tipped it back. “What the hell?”

            I was on all fours, crawling backwards toward the door as the Captain reached into the pitcher and began to pull my t-shirt out. Post flipped up the hasp on the chest with his truncheon. Morrischenko extended a booted foot, raising the lid with the toe end as I reached the door, stood and ran out, heading for the stairs. The blast that followed shattered every wall in the cell, sending cinderblock shrapnel flying throughout the area. Blinding light, followed immediately by heat on the back of my neck sent me vaulting over the rail to drop three meters and land hard on the ground next to my scooter, which was chained to the steel post supporting one side of the stairs. A rain of fiery debris and ash began falling around me. I couldn’t hear a thing after the concussive force of the blast reached my unprotected ears, but I swear I saw the steel water pitcher fly out of the middle of the flames overhead to crash hard against the dormitory style building across the street. I rolled under the stairs as the upper floor collapsed, crushing Ricardo’s shop and filling the whole block with a cloud of concrete and ash. Blinded by dust and deaf from the blast, I curled into a ball beneath the stairwell, its steel support posts knocked out of skew but still standing.

            A convict gets killed somewhere in the Freelife System about once every eleven minutes. Most of the deaths in Leaveton happen during SixKill, like Tiny’s. And, like Tiny’s death, most happen with almost nobody stepping in to help the victims of these tragedies. Such efforts as there are, like mine, prove futile in the end. This system, remote, cut-off, and harsh both in terms of the environment and its inhabitants is fertile ground for death’s harvest. Lying under the remains of the stairs leading to what had been my cell, and choking on the scorched and chemical laden air, I didn’t expect anybody to come to my aid. The garrison would send a squad down to figure out what happened, that is to say, how a convict managed to blow himself up on a planet where convicts didn’t have access to explosives. If I were caught, I could expect an interrogation similar to what I’d described to Digit, poor Digit, I thought. I needed to get away from the scene and quickly. Barely able to see and at least temporarily deaf, I managed to feel my way to the lock and chain securing my scooter to the stair post. It took me a half-dozen tries over what felt like eons of time before the shackle opened. Holding the chain in my hand I stood up and was in the process of stowing it in the cargo compartment beneath the scooter’s seat when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. In full flight or fight mode and without even thinking I swung the chain hard as I whirled to face my perceived attacker. He was big, a little taller and a lot heavier than me, but solid, not flabby. A miner most likely, wearing standard issue convict’s coveralls, his head crowned with a keffiyah, and a rag mask over his face so that only his eyes showed. He caught the chain in a gloved hand. I was shaky and off-balance. Using his weight advantage, he stepped in close and knocked me to the ground, landing on top my chest throwing loops of chain around my wrists. I tried to buck but he was too strong, so I relaxed, hoping he might do the same. Instead, he pulled the chain tighter with one hand and put his other around my throat, cutting off my air while I fought to throw him off me. He was too strong and I was nearly unconscious when he let go of my throat and unwrapped the rag from his head. I’d given a last hard pull on the chain and gotten my left hand free when he lowered his face to mine and screamed my name. I couldn’t hear him, but I saw the way his lips moved from within the bushy salt and pepper of his beard and when I met his eyes I stopped fighting.

            Of all the faces in the galaxy that I might have come across at that moment in my life, the last one I expected to see was that of Amos Albert Cold. He’d aged, but not lost a bit of the fire, the spark o’life he called it, an intense, determined stare blazing from out of his grey-green eyes. Grampa Cold had come to Freelife Seven.