Here we go, installment number 4 with plenty more to follow. For those coming to Freelife for the first time, you'll find it helpful to start with the first post as this is a serial novel. I'm opting not to give a synopsis at this point as it would require spoilers.

I'm very grateful to each and every one who takes the time to read this story. For those who have commented, sent emails, and talked to me face-to-face, your insights are a great gift. Please, keep them coming!

 Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers

Chapter Three -- Carcinano

 

            As soon as I stopped fighting, Grampa let go of the chain. I looked in wonder at the ancient visage of the man who raised me. The sulfurous atmosphere of the planet, heavy with smoke from the firebomb that had obliterated my cell, might have been to blame for the tears that filled my eyes, but the sudden urge I felt to hug the old man spoke of a greater truth. How or why he came to be with me at that particular moment, along with all the implications of his presence, would come later. Did I think I couldn’t trust him? Maybe, but being deaf and half-blind from the blast I needed a hand. His presence was ground I could stand on. For the first time in over a decade I didn’t feel completely on my own.

            Grampa helped me to my feet, scanning the street, which remained deserted. I put a hand on his shoulder, trying to say something, but was only able to cough in the toxic air. Pulling the rag mask back over his head, Grampa handed me the keffiyeh, indicating I should use it as a face scarf. He motioned for me to follow him into the rubble strewn space between the wreckage of my building and the one next door. Picking my way through the broken brick and metal shards, my callused bare feet offering poor protection from the hot remains of the shattered walls, I trailed after him. A metal trash container, three meters deep and wide, and two meters tall, had been pulled out from a niche in the adjoining building. Grampa led me into the niche, where he retrieved and opened a miner’s pack. He tossed me a worn and dirty pair of prison coveralls. They fell at my feet. He might have been talking to me, but only his eyes were visible through the mask. I stood, trembling and feeling like I might vomit until he took hold of my shoulders, gave me a good shake, and pointed at the stinking grey garment. When I still didn’t move, he picked up the coveralls and pressed them against my bare chest. Numb and nauseous, I put them on.

            When I’d awakened from Tohoana’s herbal coma, I was dressed only in jeans. Once I had the coveralls on, Grampa looked at my feet. They were bleeding from several fresh cuts. He turned away, pushing me back when I tried to follow. Holding up the index finger on one hand he shooed me back behind the trash container. I watched as he disappeared around the corner of the exploded building. Retreating into the niche, I sat on his pack to wait. I was dizzy and weak, lips cracked, and head pounding in a terrible silence that I began to suspect might be permanent. He was gone a long time, but when he returned he held the equipment bag with my climbing gear and the two pair of lightweight shoes that had scaled most of the Anglehorn Valley’s high places.

            I tried to ask how he’d come to find them, discovering immediately the difficulties the deaf have with speech. He blinked behind his mask, shook his head, and reaching for his own pack, beckoned me to follow him. Putting on a pair of the climbing shoes, I chased him down the street toward Heresy/Greed Road.

The narrow avenue of the second ring looked to be abandoned. Most of the buildings were dormitory style cells, a few inhabited by permanent residents of Freelife Seven, but most let to miner/convicts on holiday. Today, the doors stood open, the rooms behind unoccupied. The handful of shops, one man enterprises like Ricardo’s, offering games of chance, moonshine liquor, and tattoos should have been alive with activity, their proprietor’s hustling the latest rotation of bleary-eyed asteroid dwellers. The doors were locked tight. All was stillness. We soon walked far enough that the curvature of the street took us out of sight of the bomb blast. At this distance, even the smell of smoke vanished. The amber morning sky, clear of clouds and without a trace of wind, echoed the emptiness of the street. Grampa walked fast, and I came after him as best I could. My equilibrium was way off owing to my deafness, and I found myself stumbling over pebbles and shadows, like a late-night reveler who’d taken a wrong turn out of Bernie’s. As we reached the broad boulevard of Heresy/Greed, I tried to run for a few steps. Instead, I fell hard on the cracked pavement.

            Grampa came back, lifting me to my feet and helping me to a low stone wall separating two of the buildings. I sat. He pulled off his mask and tore the scarf from my face, stuffing both into a pocket of his pack. He then put his palms on my cheeks, centering my vision on his mouth while he tried to talk to me. I could see when he said my name, but beyond that I could only shake my head. He kept looking around, obviously anxious, although I couldn’t tell if it was the fact that the streets remained deserted or that he could hear someone or something coming. After a last long look in the direction we’d come from, he reached inside his coveralls and retrieved a cellophane wrapped half-stick of the ubiquitous yellow sealer every miner, spacer, and militia man carried. For patching leaks in a pressure suit, temporarily sealing a tear in a uniform, or serving as a makeshift wound dressing, the sealer, simply called yellow, was nearly as indispensable as water. He handed the stick to me and set his pack down. From an isolated pocket in his pack, he extracted a can of something that looked like oily rust but smelled like a particular fish spice I’d hated while growing up. He used a small wooden spatula to press a glob of the goop deep inside each of my ears. It hurt like a lit match, and I started to reach up to dig it out. Grampa shook his head, mouthing a firm “No!” before carefully wrapping the spatula in a piece of plastic wrap and putting it and the can of goop back in his pack. He held his hand out for the yellow stick. I felt as if a swarm of insects, buzzing and biting, had invaded my ear canal and were descending toward my brain. Grampa broke off a short length of the sealer, a gummy solid that softened quickly under finger pressure. After a few moments work, he plugged each of my ears with a pear-shaped ball of the stuff.

            He gently rotated my head from side-to-side so he could inspect his handiwork before he put away the yellow and helped me back to my feet. The biting sensation had faded to an itch. In a few more seconds, even that ceased. More importantly, when he spoke my name I heard him, just barely, his voice electronically altered like a transmission from a weak radio, but it was far better than the silence preceding it.

            “Good, yes? Garrett, can you hear me?” he asked, his voice becoming louder and more audible with each word.

            I inhaled, wrinkling my nose at the scent of the goop. “I hear you, Grampa. What is that stuff?”

            “CARCINANO,” he said, smiling with the proud look I remembered from the first time he’d shown me BLAST. “Made’t myself. Derived from cardamom and cinnamon oil, with nanobot amplifiers and a few other odd bits thrown in. Your hearing should be perfect in a few days. Your eardrums are intact or you wouldn’t hear me now. Meantime, the nanos’ll be almost as good as your natural ears after they adjust to your biochemistry. Just be sure you keep the yellow in.”

“Why is that?”

“Keeps the nanos from crawling into your eyes. That’d hurt. Might even blind you.”

I knew a little about the anatomy of the skull. At the base of the temporal bones, a small opening called the exernal acoustic meatus offered access to the interior. Eustachian tubes, tear ducts, and sinuses, surrounded the orbital cavities holding my eyes.  It seemed to me that determined nanobots had plenty of routes available besides out my ear canal and across the ledge-like zygomatic bones of my cheeks.

“What’s to keep them from getting there from the back side?”

“Your eardrums.” He had his pack back on and was impatient to get going. I remained sitting, feeling like I was ten-years-old again.

“But how did you know my eardrums were intact?”

He tapped me on the side of the head. “No bleeding from your ears. Now, do you want to sit around and explain to the militia how your cell got blown up, along with the three guys in it, or shall we get the hell out of here?”

“CARCINANO,” I repeated. It sounded like a tumor-growing agent. I shook my head, picked up the bag with my climbing gear, and started to say something more, but he was already headed toward the center of town. There were four guys in the cell, poor Digit. How did Grampa know he’d need CARCINANO today? Garrett, you’re being paranoid. Lots of the miners in Freelife have hearing trouble due to insufficient ear protection. It’s just like Amos Albert Cold to engineer a solution. I’m talking to myself. Well, shut up and get going! I fell in behind him. He was always fast and strong but the past ten years seemed to have turned him into a superman of sorts. I wondered if he’d spent the majority of that time as a spacer; he seemed so fit and young, and with me gone, farming might have lost its appeal. He never seemed suited to retirement, putting up windmills, laying out trout streams, and trying to raise a herd of buffalo. Although his hair was whiter and his face deeply lined, with dark circles under his eyes and bristly tufts of hair protruding from his ears and nostrils, his posture and stride looked like they belonged to a man half his age. I wanted to ask forbidden questions – specifically, what crime had led him to such an extreme end of life practice – but refrained. The unwritten rules of Freelife applied to family too. Besides, he seemed more in his element here than I’d ever known him to be. I’m not saying he was enjoying this anymore than I was, but he had a sureness about him that fit well with survival in the Freelife system.

            A gentle static hiss started in my left ear, but I had my balance back and quickened my pace to catch him.

            “Where are we headed?” I asked, taking some deep breaths to clear the chemical residue of the smoke I’d inhaled from my lungs.    

“Best we don’t say too much just now. There’ll be plenty o’time for talk later,” he answered. He kept walking, glancing occasionally from side to side, and rubbing his hands on the sides of his coveralls every so often. It was a nervous gesture from the old days, something he did when he had an idea of something that needed doing but didn’t quite see how to do it.

“Why aren’t we still wearing masks?”

“Boy, you always were overflowing with questions. Well, if you must know, there’s a blackout on the southern sectors, all four of ‘em. Militia ordered everyone out at the end of SixKill. And Heresy sector is under a general order of evacuation.”

Blackout orders came down from the militia from time to time. The garrison and spaceport had been under a blackout during the landing of Ella Cantor’s transport. A convict caught in a blackout sector faced possible deportation to a mining camp. That wouldn’t bother Grampa. But a convict caught willfully violating a general order of evacuation was looking at summary execution. We all knew about general orders, but during my time on Freelife Seven, none had ever been issued. I didn’t even know why such an order might be given. The masks gave us a chance to get out of the sector unrecognized if we were spotted.

“But I was in that sector.”

“Did you know about the general order?”

“Of course not, I don’t remember anything about the past hundred hours. Someone drugged me at the start of SixKill. Someone I trusted. My bad luck.”

Grampa kept walking but looked at me like I was a curious bit of vegetation that had suddenly developed the power of speech.

“Stick with that story, Garrett. It might keep you alive a bit longer.”

I thought about the militia men who’d died in the explosion. I could still see Morrischenko’s boot flipping up the hasp on the trunk, imagine the heat and shock as tarsals and metatarsals blew out of incinerated skin like bamboo sticks cast by a maniacal fortune teller, the sick sensation of the tibia bone splintering, the nerve-laden tendons and ligaments of the knee joint severing in an instant of final agony before the shock wave and fireball swallowed him, turning Morrisschenko, Post, and the Captain into bits of  something that more nearly resembled roasted eggplant than human beings. I relived the dizzy motion of my own body as I stumbled out the door, half hurtling, half falling over the rail to land heavily in the dusty street below. And again I saw the pitcher arcing up and out of the fireball, an improvised artillery shell striking the side of the dormitory and falling amidst dust and chunks of concrete, metal, and smoking flesh.

I grabbed at Grampa’s arm and stopped. He looked at me, his eyes wide with determination. He had a destination in mind and I was slowing him down. Too bad.

            “What?”

            “We have to go back.”

            “Like hell we do. You go back after knowing there’s a general order…”

            “Screw the general order, Grampa. I’m going back.”

            “You want to get spaced, boy?” He grabbed for my arm. I pulled away.

            “I’m as good as out the airlock if the militia find the thing I’m going after.”

            Grampa’s eyes got wide at the mention of the militia and stepped close, lowering his voice, his eyes darting all around.

            “Boy, if it was in your cell, ain’t nothing left but pieces of whatever it is. I don’t aim to spend my time sifting chunks of cinderblock and burnt man-flesh looking for…”

            “It’s not in the cell. It got blown clear. I saw it. And we can’t leave it behind.”

            He was measuring me, looking to see if I’d gone off the high-dive into unreality, before he looked all around the deserted street.

            “You know, boy, deliberately violating a general order can get you killed fast. The militia cleared everyone out of here in a big hurry. If you’d been in your cell when they came through, you’d be stuffed in some underground shelter in the north quarter right now.”

            “The north quarter?” He had my attention. “Why?”

            “Can’t say for sure. But there’s close to forty-thousand militia in this town right now, all armed and jumpy as electrons in a storm cloud. They’ve got patrols working every sector and I’ve seen what happens to the brave or foolish who ventured to go back into Heresy once that order was given.”

            “But you came in.” He looked at me as if I should already understand why. I hadn’t seen or heard from the man in ten years, and I didn’t have time for lengthy explanations. I needed to get that radio before one of the militia patrols found it and linked it with me.

            “Grampa, I want to hear all of this, I really do, but I have to go back now. You coming along?”

            He stood to his full height and raised his chin, looking over the top of my head at the smoke-filled street behind us.

            “What is it, what’s so important back there, Garrett?”

            “A radio…an enhanced radio…someone planted it in my cell while I was … gone.”

            “An enhanced radio, y’say?  Enhanced how?”

            “Enhanced like only an FTL ship’s commander can legally have. It’s keyed to my sLOD boss’s frequency, that’s the fellow I work for, or did. I spoke with him this morning. There was no static on the channel. Clear as this day. Do you understand any of this?”

            He smacked me, none to gently, on the side of the head.

            “Don’t talk to me like an idiot, boy. I’ve hopped around this galaxy for longer than you’ve drawn breath. Why would someone give you an enhanced radio?”

            “Why would someone booby trap my trunk? It was there. I saw it. I used it.” Grampa whistled.

            “And y’say it was blown clear? You say you saw that too, even while you were jumping for your life?”

            I quickly explained how I’d hidden it in the water pitcher when the militia arrived, ending with seeing that same pitcher catapulted from the flames and across the street. He was shaking his head.

            “I was right around the corner, boy. Saw you come out. Saw the BLAST go off…” he stopped talking and looked away for an instant. I sought his eyes, but learned all I needed to know from the sudden set of his jaw and clenching of his fists.

            “Grampa?”

            “Now, Garrett, I…”

            I looked at him with new eyes, seeing for the first time the prison greys he wore, seeing the scars on his hands and arms, scars from manual labor or fights or narrow escapes from death. He knew explosives, space survival skills, the nuances of asteroids and uninhabited bodies of all sorts. He’d been a terra-forming engineer his whole life. He was the best. Well, one of them. He’d been moving about in an evacuated zone and he saw the explosion. The BLAST. That had done it. He said the one word that I needed to connect him to the morning’s events. There was only one reason for him to be so impossibly, conveniently nearby at the moment that bomb went off.

            “You said you saw the BLAST go off. Not bomb, BLAST. That’s your personal…”

            “Now, before you go condemning me, Garrett, you need to hear me out.”

            I turned and ran, heading back toward my cell, stumbling, dizzy, clumsy with grief, my eyes tearing again, the static in my left ear growing louder. I needed to get the radio, and then I needed to get as far from Grampa as I possibly could. What else was I to think? He’d booby-trapped my cell. He’d broken in, probably didn’t even have to break the lock to the chest. He would know what sort of combinations I might choose. And he must have stowed my gear nearby. I wasn’t thinking clearly or I might have seen how that would tend to indicate that he expected me to need it again.

            When you’ve never trusted someone, felt betrayed by them even as they were shaping you into a man who could handle just about anything, your judgment of their intentions is the first casualty of a crisis. I’d suppressed or ignored my instincts when I saw his face revealed from the shroud of the rag mask. Whether it was shock or fear or just plain stupidity, I’d acted in a way that was clearly contrary to my own self-interest. At least that was how it seemed once he said the word BLAST.

            I was running now, choking on the dust and ash filling the street around my demolished domicile. Where the hell was everyone? Why cram them all into the north quarter? Was it just the residents or the visiting miners too? How did Grampa escape, and what about Digit? Did Digit know all of this? He had to, not that it mattered now, but I wished he were somehow still alive. I’d like to talk to him. And why was I there? Had I really just returned that morning? Something’s happened. Something that’s bigger than anything since SixKill. Tthe sLODs won’t like this one bit. Forty thousand militia in Leaveton sequestering all of the residents in the north quarter. Who ordered that? sLODs. It was the only possible answer. The militia are nothing but sLOD puppets, just like the rest of us.

            The street in front of me was littered with rubble from the explosion. I nearly fell, having trouble seeing in the choking air. I moved to my left, to the opposite side of the street from where my cell had been. That was where I’d find the pitcher. My best hope was that the unfortunate captain, who I no longer believed to be in any way a medical officer, had dumped the radio out before the bomb went off. Time had gone all squishy, a phrase Grampa sometimes used, when the BLAST/bomb exploded. For me to have seen it, the pitcher had to have been blown clear almost at once. The image of that dull metal tumbling out in a high arc to strike the dormitory that I now stood next too was emblazoned in my mind.

            It only took me a moment to find it. It was sitting upright on another of the low walls that separated buildings, almost exactly where I’d expected it to be. Next to it, laid out as if to dry, was my t-shirt. That meant it had remained inside the pitcher. The Captain died never knowing what lay beneath its folds. I knew from the display in front of me that I wouldn’t find the radio. But someone had found it, and left this memorial, an altar to my stupidity, for me to know that they’d found it. My stomach surged, the adrenaline of fear rising in me. The static in my left ear was a shriek now. I put a hand up to try and silence it and turned to find Grampa reaching for me. I tried to duck under him but he was faster and caught the wrist of my upraised hand.

“What is it, boy? Is it static?” he asked. I tried to ignore him, but he pulled me close and held me. “Garrett, what’s with your ear? You’re tugging at it. If you’re hearing static, it means the nanos are breaching the eardrum.”

I could smell the sweat and smoke on him, feel the hard muscles of his torso. He held my wrist so tightly that my fingers started to tingle. But it was his face that convinced me he wanted to help. Concern widened his eyes and caused the brows to dip. His mouth was open and I could see where he was missing teeth on one side of his lower jaw. It caused his speech to sound thicker, without clean ends to the consonants. The shrieking in my left ear rose to a scream. I screamed with it as spike of pain ran from the ear canal to the base of my skull. I grabbed my head in both hands and collapsed.

Grampa caught me as I fell, holding me in headlock under his right arm while his left extracted something from inside of his coveralls and began chewing it. When he pried the yellow out of my ear I screamed louder. The static buzz became a roar. Gramps spat in my ear and the roaring sounded like an explosion. He shoved whatever he’d used to pry the yellow out of my ear back into it, stirring the gob of saliva, mucus, and the unknown substance he’d so quickly masticated. There was a fizzing sound right at the point of greatest pain and then relief and silence. I felt a surge of foam running out my left ear. Drops hit the ground, some of them red. He let me go and I fell to my knees, dizzy and nauseous.

“Where’s your kit?” he asked, looking around for the bag with my climbing gear. He found it behind the wall where I’d dropped it, and pulled one of the water canteens stowed inside, snapping the top open and pouring the entire contents into my now numb left ear.

I’ll be deaf on this side forever, I thought. I looked up at Grampa and the grim set of his mouth seemed to confirm my suspicions. He threw the empty canteen aside and looked at the pitcher and t-shirt. I could still hear with my right ear, in fact, my hearing was normal on that side, maybe better than normal. That’s how it is with field repairs and nano-technology. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s a disaster.

“This what you came for?” He upended the pitcher and a drop or two of grey water fell to the ground. I nodded. “Where’s the radio?”

I shook my head and stared at a piece of twisted rebar on the ground in front of me. It reminded me of the piece I’d seen in Tiny’s broken, dead mouth. I wondered if that had been in a pocket of Post’s uniform when he’d come to see me.

“Did you see who took it?” When I shook my head again, Grampa threw the pitcher against the dormitory. It sounded like a cracked bell, a metallic rattle with no resonance.

My stomach lurched again. The thought of someone turning that radio over to the milita after telling where they’d found it made me physically ill. I’d learned something during the chat with Digit and the interrogation by the captain. I didn’t want to die, not yet, anyhow. And I’d learned something from Grampa too. Beyond just not dying, I wanted to live. I wanted my life back, if that was possible. Seeing him brought back memories of youth and promise and possibility. There were plenty of those moments too, along with the less pleasant aspects of confronting sudden death over and over again. And then I thought of Ella Cantor.

I suppose she’d not left my mind at all, since I first saw her through the ancient binoculars. When I was being carried out of Bernie’s, seeing that weave of blonde hair in front of me, even if it wasn’t Ella, allowed me to resign myself to whatever fate lay ahead. But now, I thought, seeing the braid isn’t enough. I wanted to see her, face to face. I’d never been in love. Never felt much of anything for people outside of Grampa. That’s the nature of how I was raised I suppose. But there was a hole, inside. I felt it acutely now. But the hole wasn’t totally empty. There was a small voice whispering in its depths, a voice, that said Ella Cantor might be the key to filling the lacuna in my soul before it swallowed whatever humanity I had left. The sLOD had warned of her charms. Well, they appeared to be as potent as he’d said. You ought to be running for your life and you’re thinking about a woman. Focus, boy. I am, I am.

“We need to get out of here, right now,” I said, getting shakily to my feet and picking up the kit bag. Grampa was looking back up the street, in the direction of the garrison. The dust and ash had settled now and the flames had nearly burned themselves out. The wreckage of my cell and what remained of Ricardo’s shop were plainly visible in the morning light.

“Too late,” he said, putting his pack down and raising his hands. I turned to see where he was looking. A squad of twelve militia troops, rifles at ready, marched toward us.

“Face down on the ground, now, both of you!” a corporal at the head of the phalanx shouted. We obeyed, falling onto the street to await his pleasure.

They patted us down and cuffed us, hands in front, probably hoping we’d get over confident and try to run. Jerking us to our feet, they sat us on the wall next to the t-shirt. A private who I noticed only had three fingers on one hand picked up the pitcher from where it had come to rest after Grampa threw it, and tipped it over. He’d seen some sort of action. I couldn’t imagine where. There hadn’t been a real shooting war in decades. The pitcher was bone dry now. He set it down atop the t-shirt and stood guard while the rest of the squad scouted the perimeter of the wrecked building. One of them picked up the chain on the ground next to my scooter while another looked over the machine itself. Four of them were dispatched to go search out Ricardo’s shop, but with the damage from the collapse of the ceiling they didn’t get far. In a matter of a few minutes, the search was over and the squad stood in groups of twos and threes spaced out along the street while the corporal came to talk to us.

He wasn’t very tall, but had shoulders that looked like the top an anvil, square and solid. His face was smooth, his hair cut so short you couldn’t see the color, but his eyes were light blue and had no humor to them. I guessed him to be on his first outing after basic training, a low-ranking, ambitious sort. We weren’t getting out of this one without a hell of a fight. I turned to Grampa who was looking around as if he’d just awakened from a nap. He ignored me.

The corporal unsnapped his holster and took out his pistol, checking the clip before replacing it. It was for show, the first step in intimidating us.

“What are you two doing here? This section was evacuated more than ten hours ago. You knew about the general order, right?” His voice had that innocent, naïve affectation that most inexperienced interrogators try to copy from those who are true masters. I’d been questioned by both over the years. The amateurs, like this corporal, were far more dangerous than those they looked up to. That was true whether one had something to hide or not.

Grampa spoke up. “I’m afraid, mate, that I was passed out in an alley and missed that bit of news. Too much spirits, it being SixKill and all.”

“That’s convenient. Where’s your work detail? How’d you come to be here?” I wondered how long the corporal would talk before taking us back to the garrison where more persuasive measures could be applied.

“I’m a Four. Work in the mines out there. I’m afraid I missed my shuttle. As to my being here, well, ah, I was just passing through. T’was maybe a Standard Hour or so ago, could be more, or less. I’m never too sure. Some bastard stole my watch. Headed back to Bernie’s I was, actually, hoping t’not be th’only one of my squad who overstayed his welcome. As I told you, I’m  a miner on Freelife Four. Should have gone back last night, but I was really out of it. Slept behind a trash can, I can show you the spot. Anyhow, I heard the kaboom and curiosity got the better of me. Blinking headache wasn’t going to get any better sitting on my arse feeling sorry for myself. Come by and found this one, screaming like he’d been kilt. Turned out t’was just his ears. The BL…explosion…the kaboom, you know, left him mostly deaf for the time being. I tried patching him up but all he wanted to do was fight me. He’s a screamer, like to wake the dead.”

“We heard him. But, old man, you’ve got your times mixed up. This explosion happened less than forty minutes ago,” the corporal said, “You want to try once more, only this time, tell me what really happened.”

Grampa was unfazed. He shrugged and continued as if his story still were the only possible truth. “Sorry, guv’nor, about the time I mean. It’s my first trip here. I’m a miner on Freelife Four. Did I tell you that already? You know Four? Like working in an escape pod with the gyro smashed, tumbling and shaking so that you don’t know if your thoughts are in your feet or your head. I tell you, it makes a man appreciate flat ground. That was a hard enough adjustment, then I got thrown onto this rock for what’s touted as a rest break. Psshaw! The way it takes the sun forever to come up. Never saw nothing like it…”

“What sort of miner are you? What do you do on Four?”

Grampa smiled, his chest swelling as if he were sharing his proudest moment with the person he most admired. “Rock smasher. I run the big machine. You know we pulverize seventy metric tons a week on Four, and for what? A handful of crystals that any respectable nano-gemlogist could grow in a lab in a Standard Hour. You ever wonder why we…”

“Just shut up. And I’m not your mate or guv’nor so save the nicknames for the greys.” When the corporal said that one of the privates stepped close to Grampa, his rifle pointed at the old man’s head. Grampa lowered his eyes, but I could see his hands tense and the throbbing of veins. I wondered if he were about to try something simultaneously brave and foolish. Greys was a term used to describe convicts everyplace but in Freelife. That meant this corporal was part of a surge unit and therefore on unfamiliar ground. It also made him much more likely to act rashly. I hope Grampa figured that in his calculations of what to do next.

The corporal was on my left side and I didn’t hear the first question he asked me. Only when the other soldier poked me with the barrel of his rifle did I look up and realize it was my turn.

“I asked what your story was? Were you passed out in an alley too?”

Another of Grampa’s lessons: When you’re caught in something you shouldn’t be, the best course of action is to tell as much truth as you can. You’ll be asked to repeat the story many times, especially if the matter is something serious, and the less you have to make up, the less you have to remember. If you lived it, you can tell it.

“No, not exactly. I don’t remember much after the start of SixKill.” I talked fast and told him who I was, including the fact I was a Deputy Marshall, and about my being hijacked at Bernie’s, assuming that bit of news had gotten around. “I woke up here this morning. That’s my scooter your man is poking around,” I said. The man who’d found the chain was going through the storage compartment. I wished it had been booby-trapped too. That would have given them something to think about, if it didn’t kill all of us. BLAST. I avoided looking at Grampa. Why had he done this? By themselves, either of our stories sounded flimsy. Together, they were laughable.

“Three militia – two privates and a medico – were sent over here today,” the corporal said. “They didn’t report back yet. You see them?”

“I was outside when the explosion happened,” I said. “They might have been tossing my place.”

“So, you laid a trap for anyone who might go in there? Is that how it is?”

“No, that isn’t how it is,” I was genuinely offended by his suggestion. “I was doing easy time here. Working for a sLOD boss and trying to stay out of everyone else’s way. Why would I want to screw up a deal like that?”

The corporal was staring at the knee of my coveralls. There was a tear from when I’d fallen earlier and my jeans were peeking through.

“Why’d you try and help that whale at Bernie’s?” The corporal asked the question in a way that made me think he’d been there. I waited a moment before answering, trying to see the bar crowd at Bernie’s. I couldn’t place the corporal’s face among those I remembered.

“Tiny’s one of those types that needs, well, needed a lot of help.”

“So, in addition to being a Deputy Marshall, you’re a regular humanitarian, are you?”

“Look, I didn’t blow anyone up. I woke up here after being drugged and kidnapped. Someone was in my cell. I was outside when the bomb …”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that.” The corporal, who had stood with one foot on the wall, one hand resting on the sidearm holstered on his right hip, now took a step back. The hand remained on the holster, fingers caressing the pistol as he spoke. “I think now we’re all going to take a walk back to the garrison. You can tell your fables to someone with more patience for animal chatter. I was sent here to see what happened and to pick up any cons that might be in the area. I’ve done that, so...” He pressed his index finger to the center of my forehead and pantomimed shooting me. “Mission accomplished, Marshall. Let’s get going.”

They got us to our feet and prodded us into the roadway.

“I’d like to take my bag,” I said. The climbing gear meant a lot to me, and if I survived the upcoming ordeal at the garrison, I intended to spend some time out of town, high up on the Anglehorn, doing nothing. The corporal picked up the bag and looked inside, his face expressionless as he tossed the kit to one of the privates to carry. He glanced at Grampa’s pack without opening it, a typical miner’s outfit, and ordered one of the others to bring it along as well. He stopped when he saw the pitcher lying in the road, glanced at it and the t-shirt, but left them without comment.

“Should have left the gear, boy,” Grampa whispered through clenched teeth from where he stood to my right. I didn’t say a word, just began walking when I felt the barrel of the rifle prod me on down the road. It was six kilometers to the garrison. They quick-marched us the whole way. Grampa tried to talk until the corporal told him if he opened his mouth again it would be to eat a bullet.

 

We were following the curve of the second ring clockwise, through Heresy. The avenue this way looked pretty much the same as it had the other direction with some notable exceptions. The militia must have made some examples of convicts who violated the general order to evacuate the sector. Some cell and shop doors stood open, bits of trash and personal effects scattered on the ground nearby as if whoever had occupied the spaces had left in a hurry. Outside of these buildings, dark brown to black stains marred the sidewalks, the kind left behind when a man or woman bleeds out. There were no bodies along the road we walked but you could smell the coppery tang of blood and the raw meat smell of a killing floor. I watched the soldiers. They had formed a column on either side of Grampa and me. They kept their eyes forward but when we passed the stained places, three fingers showed an involuntary twitch at the corners of his mouth. You learn to watch for things like that when you live with psychos.

We stopped for a few moments at the entrance to one of the underground shelters, the door of which had been propped open with a fist-sized rock, while the three-fingered private went down the stone stairway to investigate. He came up with two scared-looking young cons who he reported catching in a moment of shared intimacy. From the disgusted look on his face, I was surprised he hadn’t just shot them and left the bodies below.

“Buggery?” the corporal asked.

The private shook his head. “Not yet, sir, but if we’d been just a few minutes later…”

The corporal narrowed his eyes and looked at the pair.

“Is that so? You moles go down there to play hide the snake?” Local militia could care less what cons did in their free time, so long as the work got done, but the surge units, among other things, didn’t like the idea of consensual sex between cons of either gender. They’d pay to see and even participate in violent rape, and what happened to Tiny spoke to even more degrading tastes on the part of some. Since chemical sterilization of both male and female convicts was part of our preparation for transport, it really didn’t matter what we did with each other. No longer human, we weren’t allowed to reproduce. As far as some of the surge militia were concerned, we shouldn’t be allowed to fuck either. Grampa and I had evidently fallen in with such a crew.

The two men, really just boys, younger even than I was when I came to Freelife, vehemently denied they were doing anything. Good looking, with blonde hair and fair skin, they clearly would have stayed busy servicing miners when things were normal. Now, they claimed they’d simply hid in the shelter when they heard us approaching.

“You should have closed the door,” the corporal said. “Why did you come into this sector?” They said it was a mutual dare, after hearing the explosion, figuring any patrols would be too busy investigating to notice them. I shook my head and glanced at Grampa, who was watching the now distant smoke column above my cell.

“Knowing there was a general order to evacuate this sector, you did that?” The corporal said.

Suddenly seeing their peril the two looked at one another and tried to run. I shouted “No!” and managed to take a step after them. I would have decked the militia private standing in front of me only Grampa caught me, hissing for me to stay put. I discovered I no longer had any fight in me where the old man was concerned.

The corporal shot them himself, in the back, two well-aimed slugs apiece from his sidearm that sent them tumbling. He took his time walking over to the prone and bleeding bodies, turning each over with the toe of his boot. They were still alive. I could see their pleading last breaths when he administered a coups-de-grace between the eyes of each.

“Good thing you were drunk, mate,” The corporal said to Grampa, reloading his pistol before holstering it. “Willingly violating a general order to evacuate a sector could get you killed.” At that moment I remembered the keffiyeh and the rag mask in Grampa’s pack. Now I understood why he wished we’d left the kits behind. A disguise like that might be used to show intentional violation of the order to not enter the sector. The fact we weren’t wearing them when they caught us wouldn’t hold much weight with people for whom summary executions without trial were just part of a day’s work.

The corporal looked at me as he reloaded his sidearm. “Regular humanitarian, aren’t you, Marshall. I’m surprised, really. I thought it would be the old man who’d try and stop me.”

“They were just boys, stupid boys. You didn’t have to kill them.”

“Greys ain’t human, Marshall. I’ll kill them anytime I feel like it.” 

Two of the privates had zipped the bodies of the boys into lightweight bags and slung them over their shoulders, and our march continued.

 

We came out of the sector on Heresy/Limbo Road, turning left onto the well-maintained artery that led directly into the heart of the garrison, and beyond which lay the expansive tarmac and outbuildings of the spaceport. We heard traffic on the road long before the curving avenue brought it into view. Heavy troop transports were moving from the garrison toward the center of the town in the lanes nearest us. On the opposite side, we saw shuttle buses headed the opposite way. The windows were all blacked out on these so we couldn’t tell if there were convicts inside or not. A pair of sentries flanked the entrance to the avenue we emerged from. One was a sergeant, the other a corporal. The sergeant and the leader of our squad moved off a few paces and spoke quietly while the sentry corporal stared unblinkingly at Grampa and me, as if we were on the verge of performing some feat of mystical trickery.

The squad leader saluted the sergeant, who moved off further, talking on his radio. The sentry stopped the convoy to allow us to cross over to the median. We fell into a single line, walking between the two streams of traffic toward the high-arched gates of the garrison.

The shuttle buses, which would normally vector off onto the roadway leading to the spaceport, instead went straight through the open gates of the militia base. Nothing was normal in Leaveton as we passed under the arch, a high curve crowned with the sLOD emblem, the symbol of our beneficent galactic government – a blackened metal eagle, three meters high, wings spread and holding a clutch of arrows in one talon and a naked woman in the other. Atop the eagle’s head sat a crown of thorns. On the arch between the two stone pillars that marked the threshold of the base, was the bastardized phrase in ancient Latin – summas Lapis Occultus Dominatoris – “high-born Rulers of the Secret Jewel.”

“We’re all just puppets,” I said to Grampa as we passed under the arch. The noise of the heavy vehicles moving on either side of us kept all but me from hearing his reply.

“Not for long, boy.”

 

My previous visits to the garrison all involved the inspection of my radio. The militia were absolutely paranoid that some con would get hold of an interstellar communication device, enabling him or her to talk to the folks back home, or the media, or members of their old gang. What we could possibly tell them that would be damaging to Freelife I never did figure out, but I endured the inspection. It always took place in a sergeant’s cubicle. I’d be summoned at some odd and inconvenient hour, usually by having a couple of privates show up at my cell right after I’d fallen asleep. They’d have a transport of some sort and we’d all ride together while they made jokes about picking up strays before they hurt somebody, or it being a dull night on the shooting range and they needed some live targets to practice on. I laughed along with them and then sat quietly in the cubicle while the sergeant looked my radio over, verified the serial number and model were the same as the previous inspection, and then keyed the call button. My sLOD boss always replied within a matter of seconds, no matter what the hour. To my amusement, the boss always expressed his annoyance at the maltreatment of his personal asset, that asset being me. The sergeant would grovel for a few minutes, explaining that it was a routine security check. The sLOD gave the required answers, interrupted by frequent bursts of static, and eventually I and my verified radio were dumped back in front of my cell.

This time, instead of going to the communications center near the main gate, we were handed over to a sergeant and two privates who took us by ground car to the northeast corner of the garrison. A long, low building of cinder block, built so that half its height was underground, with a single door facing the roadway and lacking any windows, hunched at the end of an unpaved road.

In all my years of seeing the garrison, I’d not ever noticed this building. It had a stone roof that overhung the walls, arranged in such a way that, viewed from overhead, it might have been an undeveloped part of the rugged landscape of the valley floor. The perimeter road circled behind a series of low hills which would have hidden all but the irregular peak of the roof to observation from anyone who wasn’t on the base itself.

Still handcuffed, Grampa and I were led down a short flight of stairs where a sentry admitted us through an armored door, followed by the sergeant and one of the privates. The sergeant carried my kit bag. The private had Grampa’s pack. Just inside the door, a second sentry opened another armored door and our party descended a much longer flight of stairs, lit by low level strip lights along the handrails. When we reached the bottom landing, a pair of sliding doors opened and we stepped onto a well-lit platform that was like every other mining elevator I’d been on since coming to Freelife.

Grampa, who’d behaved himself for longer than I thought possible, finally spoke.

“Any chance of getting a bite to eat around here?”

I knew he was half-serious. I’d had nothing to eat in longer than I really knew, unless someone had fed me somehow while I was knocked out, and the nanobots in my right ear had sufficiently adjusted to my biochemistry that I could hear Grampa’s stomach growling. To my surprise, the sergeant took a pair of nutrient bars from the sleeve pocket of his uniform and handed one to each of us. With our hands cuffed in front of us, we probably looked like the sort of savages the militia pretended we were as we tore the wrappers with our teeth and greedily consumed the bars. In the meantime, the private started the elevator down the shaft. Grampa walked to stand a step from the far edge. There were no rails on the sides of the platform. The shaft was large enough that a full two meters of empty space existed between the lift and the walls of the excavation.

“Be careful,” the sergeant cautioned, “I’d be mighty annoyed at having to explain an accident.”

“Why’s that?” Grampa asked. “We’re just a couple of greys got picked up in a general order zone. Seems like an accident might be exactly what’s called for here.”

“All the same, please be careful,” the sergeant said. We’d descended into almost total darkness, with only intermittent green bulbs glowing dimly every few seconds as we dropped deeper into the planet’s crust. I tried to make out the sergeant’s expression but the light was insufficient. He looked familiar. I thought he might have been part of the garrison rather than a surge soldier. All the same, I expected his face wore a sarcastic smirk. I’d never heard a militia man say please to anyone in grey coveralls.

The elevator stopped automatically. I didn’t know if the private had preset it to this level or we had reached the bottom of the shaft. Grampa must have wondered too, because he crumpled the foil wrapper from his bar and started to throw it over the side. The sergeant saw what he was up to and held his hand out. Grampa dropped the paper into the upturned palm, looked at me and shrugged. The platform doors opened and revealed a hallway, carved out of the bedrock and lit by the same dim track lighting as the stairs above.

We followed the sergeant down the hall, past a half dozen doors on either side. They had numbers on them, all starting with 110-. I assumed that meant we were 110 levels deep in the shaft, though I had no idea how that translated into meters. At 110-13, the sergeant stopped, punching a code into an unlit keypad recessed in a slot beside the door, and the door unlocked and opened, revealing a well-lit and immaculately finished cell, perhaps six meters square, with twin bunks, a steel table bolted to the floor, and a locker where our packs were deposited and secured with a numbered steel band. It wasn’t a lock, just a strip of metal perhaps a centimeter wide and ten centimeters long.

“Someone will be with you soon. Please make yourselves at home.” I could see the sergeant’s face this time. He wasn’t smirking. He took a look at both of us, longer than seemed necessary to my way of thinking, as he stepped out and secured the door. There was no handle on the inside. A thin slot near the six-meter-high ceiling was the only other egress from the cell. I guessed it was the ventilation shaft. The air was surprisingly fresh, and the lighting, a bank of sodium bulbs mounted behind a diffuser in the center of the ceiling, lit the space almost as well as if we’d been on the surface in full daylight.

“Make youselves at home,” Grampa said, exaggerating the words so that they sounded far less sincere than when the sergeant had spoken them. He paced the length and width of the cell, counting his steps, then went to the bunks, lifting the bare mattresses to reveal nothing but steel webbing underneath. He went to the locker and pulled on the seal, coming up with a cut on his thumb for his trouble. Sucking on the cut, he kicked at the steel table. It didn’t even vibrate. “They might have at least given us something to drink,” he said after several more circumnavigations of the space, finally sitting on the lower bunk and staring at his wounded thumb. Like me, he’s always healed quickly and it appeared that the wound had stopped bleeding.

I was awestruck at the whole situation. Why build something like this next to a prison town with a few thousand unarmed lifers? When had it been done and why was it so well concealed? Not a whisper of a huge underground installation beneath the garrison had ever reached my ears. It was unnerving. And who were Grampa and I that the militia felt the need to show it to us?

“What’s this all about, Grampa?” I asked, now that he’d settled down.

He looked at me and made a slashing motion across his throat, pointing up at the slit and then cupping his ear with one hand. I didn’t really care who might be listening, I was going to have some answers.

“Look, I’ve been beaten up, drugged, kidnapped, almost killed in my own cell – by an amateur bomber I might add, half-deafened, arrested, and now I’m locked in what might very well be my grave. The least you can do is enlighten me on something. Let’s start with how you happened to be so conveniently close when the BLAST went off.” I could tell I’d gotten to him in two places, first when I described the bomber as amateur and second when I said BLAST. He looked ready to pounce but I had the table between us so I’d have time to react. He was fast and strong but if I saw the attack coming I stood at least an even chance of repelling it.

“Why do you think I was there, boy?”

“I think you set that bomb. I think you were trying to kill me. What I don’t get is why you, and why now?”

His eyes widened at my frank disclosure of my suspicions. He glanced up at the slit in the wall and then looked down at the floor, clasping his fingers so that I again saw the veins stand out on the backs of his hands.

“If that’s the case, Garrett, you ought to also ask why I haven’t finished the job.”

I was wound pretty tight. “Why would you bother to tell me? You said the BLAST wrecked my cell. BLAST. That’s your personal explosive cocktail. What am I supposed to think?”

“Well, now you’ve done it,” he said. He looked up at the slot. “Hey, whoever is listening up there! Turn on your recording devices because Amos Albert Cold is about to make a full confession.” He stood up and I went into a fighting crouch. He wasn’t even looking at me; he just walked to the table and leaned heavily on it. “I’ve been in the system for a little over a year, Garrett. Mining on Freelife Four, just like I told that pistol-dick corporal. This is my first ever trip to Freelife Seven. I came for my holiday, over SixKill. I know that’s stupid, or considered a stupid time for holiday among the cons, but you know me – all in or not at all.”

“So, how did you end up at my cell?”

“I didn’t even know you were on the planet until SixKill was half-gone. I was up in the north quarter, trying to get myself killed, I suppose. That’s one rough neighborhood, I’ll tell you that.”

I nodded. I’d gone to the north quarter on my first trip to Freelife Seven too, when I was still a miner. Lots of newbies went on their first trip. Most never went back. Some never came out again.

“Anyhow,” Grampa continued, “A body turned up in the quarter. A big old boy who looked like he’d had a building dropped on him. They left him right in the middle of the quarter, under one of those abominable green lights. As dead and decayed as he was, he probably was green without the light. Turned my stomach to look at him, and I’m a man who’s seen a lot of bodies.”

“That would be Tiny Harrowfill. He was killed by militia, I was there.”

Grampa nodded and sat on his bunk again. He looked tired, resigned.

“Well, the talk started that a Deputy Marshall had been involved in his killing. Do you know people on this planet, both cons and militia, really hate the Deputy Marshalls?” He wanted me to say something. When I didn’t, he lay down on the bunk and faced the wall before he resumed speaking. “I suppose you know that everyone up there thinks you killed that boy.”

“That’s not what everyone thinks, Grampa. Bernie’s was packed when he died. It was a circus. Everyone there saw who killed him. I was the only one who defended him. I nearly died with him.”

Grampa shook his head.

“No, that’s not how they tell it. At least not in the quarter. I heard it from militia and from cons. Garrett Cold done Tiny, they said. That’s his bandana tied around the stick.”

“Stick?”

“Yeah, the stick. Just a splinter of wood, a foot or so long, shoved into Tiny’s rectum. A red bandana tied onto it. The thing is, they say this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.”

Now I was pacing the cell, counting my steps, trying the table for stability. I had not killed Tiny, but I had killed a man, in the mines, a fellow who would have killed me if I didn’t do him first. It was a long time ago. I told Grampa about it now.

“It was self-defense, Grampa.”

“And the stick?”

“Some of his buddies rigged it up. Shoved a piece of rebar in the dead guy’s ass and tied a piece of cloth with my name on it. Said I was a dangerous psycho, not fit to live even on Freelife. The sLOD boss pulled me out shortly after.”

Grampa sat up and looked across the cell at the door.

“So, I’m still new here, Garrett, but I noticed that there don’t look to be too many actively violent sorts running loose. I thought maybe they had a special place for them, you know, on one of the other asteroids or something. Of course there are plenty in that north quarter who might qualify, except they’re all smart enough to turn their particular fetishes into a trade.”

“There is no place here for the really dangerous ones, Grampa.” I couldn’t believe I had to explain this to the old man. He worked the mines, out of sight of sLOD’s and militia for long periods of time. Accidents happened. I looked up at the slot in the wall. “For this place to work at all, everyone has to contribute. You know that. We don’t work, we don’t produce the quotas out of the mines, we don’t eat. It’s been that way since the original SixKill. But you don’t imagine that everyone who comes here just agrees to that sort of life, do you? Don’t answer. I know you don’t. But we all figure it out pretty damn quick. Think about your orientation.”

“What about it?” He scratched his head, a gesture that told me he was only half-listening.

“How many died?”

“What?”

“How many died? How many died learning to put on a pressure suit? How many died because they didn’t listen to the instructions? Or they did listen but didn’t understand? How many died because they didn’t learn how to patch a leak in that same suit, or to get off a mine elevator the right way? Half? Three quarters?”

Grampa was looking at me now. It was the same look he always gave me when I was explaining something I was passionate about and to him it sounded like a buffalo breaking wind. Another of his pet phrases for when someone talked to long – “I can’t hear you over the buffalo farts, son.”

“How many, Grampa?”

“There were forty-eight of us in the orientation class. Twenty-eight didn’t make it.”

“My group was forty-four. Nineteen made it.”

“Is this going somewhere, Garrett?”

I was frustrated to the point of screaming. How had he lived almost a year without learning this? “Gramps, the reason so many die at orientation is because not everyone is cut out for this life. Hell, maybe none of us are, but some adapt quicker than others. And that continues. You must have seen it in the mines.”

“Maybe I did, but maybe I missed it. Humor an old man, Garrett.”

I stopped pacing and stood facing him, no longer keeping the table between us.

“If you don’t pitch in, do your part, and learn to conform so that when you get in a jam someone sees you as something more than just another mouth to feed, then you’ll probably die in an accident of one sort or another within weeks. We all screw up when we get here. Didn’t you?”

He shrugged, as if he couldn’t remember. I waited him out.

“All right, sure. Plenty of times. But I helped a lot of people too.”

“Exactly. And what do you suppose happens to someone who doesn’t help, who fights for their own space, over and over again?” He looked at me. “The mines are deep, Gramps. A lot can happen that looks accidental. If ten men go down into a mine and one thinks he’s going to live according to the rules that got him sent out here in the first place, only nine men will come out. Guess which one will be missing?”

“What exactly are you trying to say, Garrett?”

“I’m saying that a violent criminal, who tries to act out against the population here, would be killed at the first opportune moment. It might be militia, it might be another con, but someone will make an end of that kind of trouble. We have to or this place would collapse into anarchy.”

Grampa appeared to consider what I was saying. He looked up at the space where I was now convinced an audience was taking down every word we said. Then he stood up and took my hands. Looking directly into my eyes he asked, “And did you ever take part in these murders, Garrett? Was that why you killed Tiny?”

“What? No. I didn’t kill Tiny, Grampa. Are you even listening to me?”

“Well, I suppose I shouldn’t listen too hard to rumors. So, these killings, of the non-conformists, you’ve seen it?”

“No, no one sees it when it happens. But you hear things. And like you said, there don’t appear to be any violent offenders running amok anywhere in the system.”

He nodded and let go of my hands.

“But you’ve never actually seen a violent offender run amok and then die. Do they just disappear? Are the bodies found? I’m interested in this, Garrett, because you’ve been here a lot longer than me and I’m interested.”

“Grampa, after you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll understand. Some things you don’t have to see…” He shook his head. What I’d just said went against a lifetime of his standing behind a principle. If you didn’t see it, or the proof of it, it didn’t happen. And if all you have to go on is an outcome and can’t prove the path that led to it, then you’re wishing on the wrong star. He believed in cause and effect, hypothesis and proof. He hated people who acted on the basis of what he called SWAG knowledge. “Scientific Wild-Assed Guesses get you killed in space, Garrett,” he’d said to me enough times that now, standing in front of him in a cell deep beneath the militia garrison, I felt ashamed of my own convictions. He’d handed me the right answer when he said he should stop listening to rumors about Tiny’s death.

“How did you find me?”

“I started asking. Took a long time. I had to spend most of my credits on drinks and other forms of entertainment, mostly for other cons, to get them to talk to me, and I really did sleep in alleys. Cheaper that way. Anyhow, this fellow, goes by Digit, ran up on me this morning and asks if I was the miner looking for GC. He calls you GC.”

“I know Digit, Grampa. Go on.”

“He showed me where you lived. Got all excited at seeing your scooter. Told me he needed to go in and speak to you as you’d been missing for some time and he had important business to conduct. I told him that was fine. I didn’t want you dying of shock at seeing me. I was ready to come up when the militia crew came out of that building across the street, like they’d been waiting, or watching for you. I hid behind the trash bin until they got inside. I was behind a wall where I could see your door when you came out, and then the bomb went off.”

“I don’t buy any of this, Grampa. You set that bomb. You knew all along…”  

“Garrett, you’ve been here ten years. The kinkies and the sLOD keep this place cut off from the rest of human life and the only reality you see is what they create, and most of it is fiction. You have to have suspected that.”

I nodded.

“Well, I’ve only been here a year and a lot has changed back home. More than you might care to know.” I was shaking my head. I didn’t want to know. That was part of getting along in Freelife. When newbies came in, we didn’t allow them to talk about what went on back in the softie worlds. That kind of talk only led to people making crazy plans, the kind that led to revolutionary acts. Better that we all accept our fate, forget our past, and make the best of the time we had. Grampa held my eyes as I thought through all that had happened to me in the past two local days. Things had changed. I’d had moments when revolutionary ideas came to the forefront of my mind. And there was something else. Something that left me frightened and confused enough every time I thought about it that, even if he was an insane bomber, I needed to tell him about it.

“Grampa, there’s something I think I should tell you. It’s about what happened to me when I left the farm. I thought I could leave it behind, but I know I can’t. There are some things you never leave behind. They follow you, sometimes as memories and sometimes…”

“Whatever it is, forget it, boy. We’re both here now. I might have been in denial during your trial that anyone with Cold blood could do the things they accused you of, but I know better now. If you were guilty, and I guess, painful as it is to admit, the evidence said you were guilty, then I forgive you. And I hope you’ll forgive me for what I’ve done too.”

“You mean the bomb?” He shook his head. “Well what then? What are you talking…” I didn’t finish the sentence. The door behind us swung open and three people walked into the cell. The first was the commander of the garrison, Lt. Colonel Argent Rheynstadt, a man who claimed to come from seventy-one generations of military men, dating back to the final days of humanity’s home world. I’d been interviewed by him briefly during my first days as Deputy Marshall. He’d let me know that the red bandana, while it gave me certain privileges as a convict, didn’t change my status with the militia one bit, except that they would be looking to me for answers if Freelife Seven’s work force didn’t continue to perform their duties efficiently. It was a threat he didn’t need to make and we both knew it. I suppose he just wanted to see the freak that some sLOD boss had decided to elevate from rock breaker to puppet spy, and to brag about his military heritage. Seventy-one generations of stupidity, I thought at the time.

Behind him was the corporal who’d brought us in. He’d changed into a dress uniform and was no longer carrying a sidearm. I doubted that he was truly unarmed, and I wondered what sort of weapon was concealed in the small satchel he carried.

When the third man entered the room, I fell back on the bunk so suddenly that Grampa almost stumbled over my feet as he moved to get a better look.

His head bandaged so that only one eye and ear could be seen and his arm in a sling, he was still recognizable. It had to be the direction of the BLAST along with the extra wall of the privy closet that saved his life. Now he stood in front of me, dressed not in the ripped coveralls of a bombing survivor, but in the khakis of a militia soldier decorated with the gold diamond insignia of a major. Pinned beneath the insignia, were the three black bars that identified the convict I’d known as Digit as a senior intelligence officer.

“Hello, GC,” he said in a hesitant monotone, all trace of his stammer gone. “You’ll have to pardon my appearance, as well as any difficulty I have in speaking. I’m quite deaf on the right side and the ringing in my left ear pretty much drowns out all but the clearest sounds. However, I guess I should thank you for this knock in the head.” He fingered the bandages wrapping his skull. “Had I been in the main room of your cell when that bomb went off, I’d probably be as dead as my protégé and his bumbling assistants.” He turned to the corporal and nodded. Smiling, the corporal opened his satchel and placed the single item it contained in the center of the table. Saluting Digit, he moved to the door and stood at attention, eyes fixed on me.

Digit knelt before the radio and looked up at Grampa who swallowed hard.

“Let’s talk about this radio, shall we, Amos?”