Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers -- Chapter Seven, Ella

In the preceding Chapter, Garrett finds himself a prisoner in the Arena, a notorious entertainment palace in the North Quarter of Leaveton. To his great surprise his captors include the battered but fierce Tohoana, the mysterious Dockrill Castello, and the alluring and dangerous convict Ella Cantor.

Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers

Chapter Seven – Ella 

            The beating Tohoana gave me swelled the tissues around my eyes so that I only saw blurs of light and shadow, their edges crystallized by a steady flow of tears. I had to breathe through my mouth and the taste of blood and mucus running from my nostrils gagged me each time I swallowed. I could turn my head to the side for relief, only I couldn’t look away from the two figures gazing at me from the foot of the cot.

            The echoes of Bradna Cucrow’s voice still echoed along with the ringing in my ears. Beneath that I was aware of the sound of blood coursing through my body, driven by a heart that pounded savagely against the confining ribs. Like an animal trapped, baited, and ultimately betrayed by its keepers, I lay as an object of curiosity before seven pairs of eyes. Whether they saw with me contempt, loathing, wonder, or amusement didn’t seem to matter much. I realized I’d fallen into a web of conspiracy and lies that was years in the making.

            It seemed odd that my thought processes worked so clearly when my body was so profoundly non-functioning. I no longer felt any pressure from the cords holding me fast to the frame of the cot, nor did the cramps in my thighs, calves, arms, and shoulders cause me any significant discomfort. My limbs simply refused to respond to the commands of my brain and so the mind had turned inward, to remember and piece together the significant moments that had brought me to this place and time, to be trussed for the slaughter, it seemed, at the pleasure of my host and hostess – not the unfettered wrath of the militia under Rheynstadt with his hired guns Bundy and the late Cypher Hegemon, nor the two-faced Digit, aka Dominicus Akyron, nor Amos Cold, the grandfather who had taught me how to live by taking me to the edge of death over and over again. No, I was held like an insect pinned to a board by a ghost and a legend, a woman acknowledged as the most lethal alive and an ancient convict ruler, working in consort to purposes and ends I might never understand.

            What had Bradna Cucrow said to me? That I was to lead a revolution against the garrison, to retake Leaveton and ultimately all of Freelife? And Cassie, Cassandra Caggonar, the LT who’d given me more answers in the first five minutes of knowing her than all my so-called friends and relatives had in nearly seven standard days, revealing to me that the sLOD intended to disband the militia, to take away the last limitation on their ascension to unlimited power. That plan, made more than three decades ago, moving with a force as invisible and perhaps more powerful than the radiation from the many-trillions of suns that filled the almost vacuum of space, seemed to mean only one thing to me: If the sLOD had the ability to pull it off then they already held the power they hoped to secure. It wasn’t a contradiction, but simply the culmination of thirty years of planning and manipulation.

            Did the sLOD intend for Rheynstadt to rebel?  How might that play into such a far-reaching vision? Another enigma to worry away at the deeper cracks in my hypno-techno-experientially mucked up brain.

            I smelled jasmine, a favored plant on Thebes. I recalled chilly mornings, with the mist coming off the lowlands where Grampa’s buffalo herds grazed, and the sweet smell of the plants surrounding the porch where we sat together to discuss the day’s work, sharing time over a steaming cup of Cocurahaptha berry cider. “Nectar of the sLOD’s,” Grampa called it, saying that he’d learned of it during his terraforming years in the outer planets when a young sLOD had jumped in close to observe the operation from orbit. “Ship looked like a chemist’s nightmare, Garrett. Don’t even begin to understand how the thing worked. A glass disk it were, or so it appeared to me, with beakers and tubes and funnels, all in translucent colors. Big it were, too. Large enough that if it set down here on Thebes it’d cover all the land I own four times over. When it jumped into the system the Thebans, myself included, thought we’d at last been discovered by some race from beyond our galaxy.”

            “Did you see the sLOD?” I’d asked.

            “No, reclusive devil, the sLOD. Never left his ship. I imagine he had plenty of tech, cameras and the like, that could look at just about any place where curiosity might tickle him. But he kept to his vessel. If you ever actually meet a sLOD, face to face, I’d guess the best thing to do would be to run in the opposite direction. Part of their power, you know, the mystique, comes from their inapproachability. Beneficent wizards who make life pleasant, until you pull back the curtain. I’d be mighty careful about doing that. But this sLOD, with the Theban population on the verge of panic, sent a party down to the site to explain what was up,” he laughed, pointing at the sky, “And gifted us a million liter tank full of fermented Cocurahaptha along with a handful of seeds. Thee shalt take great care of that with which we have entrusted thee, the emissary said in a voice that would have made a kinky tremble. Turns out the seeds were genetically engineered in the oddest way. They grow well enough, as you know, and produce more berries in a year than I really need, but the damn things are sterile. They don’t produce seeds. The berries are just skin and meat and juice. I thought they might be like seedless grapes and tried planting the whole fruit. Nothing ever came of that. I tried cuttings. They withered and died within a day. Of course, s’long as the canes grow back on the original plants every year, I don’t need any seeds. Still, it’s peculiar. Like that sLOD, I guess.”

            It wasn’t obvious at the time, my being unfamiliar with much of the sLOD philosophy, history, and technological capabilities. But now, it was plain to me that giving sterile seeds devalued the gift. Grampa would never profit from the berry business. But he had enough to keep everyone on Thebes happy for as long as I lived there.

            The jasmine scent took me back to that long ago discussion. It must be richly concentrated someplace in the room to penetrate my bleeding nose. I thought it had to be emanating from the three loin-cloth clad giants surrounding me. Something on their skin or hair. They looked like the ancient Greco-Roman gods from Grampa’s books. I turned my head to see the one on my right. He was a full two meters tall and looked like a golden wax figure. Other than the silken blonde locks trailing over his shoulders he appeared to be hairless. His hands were broad and his fingers manicured, the nails gleaming even in the flickering dimness of the candlelit room. His eyes were fixed on the far wall but I felt as if his whole attention was focused on me. There was a palpable tension surrounding me, the humming concentration of muscles and tendons held ready for violent movement, like a power plant about to go on line.

            “Garrett Cold.”

            It was Dockrill Costello who spoke in a gentle voice. I looked to him and dipped my chin toward my chest. I wasn’t even sure I could speak. Tohoana hadn’t knocked out any teeth but my whole jawline sang in an energetic agony of bruises.

            “You have come to us dressed in the uniform of our enemy. Yet I saw with these eyes,” he raised a long finger to the bridge of his nose, looking at each of the other witnesses before turning back to me, “I saw you fighting against and killing that same enemy.”

            That meant he’d probably also seen me kill the Sarconian, a convict who probably had lived under Dockrill’s protection, who may have attacked us by Dockrill’s command.

            Dockrill looked at Bradna who handed him a rag, extracted from a pocket of his glittering uniform. Dockrill unfolded it and studied the stains in the fabric. Finding a spot that was mostly clean, he carefully wiped his hands and each individual finger before handing the rag back to Bradna.

            “My hands were made unclean because I am bound by a long ago oath to aid all our brethren on Freelife, Garrett Cold. You were our brethren until you put on the uniform of our enemy. But you killed our enemy and so I think you may not know what you are. I brought you here unaided. On my back I carried you while dragging your companion. It’s a long ways from the killing ground where I found you to this place. But I brought you here because you were once our brethren, and we must determine if that is still true.”

            He hadn’t yet invited me to speak and I still doubted if I could, though I’d made a few tentative movements in swallowing. The blood flow from my nose had stopped. Perhaps the same force that had aided the healing of the cut on my leg was at work repairing the damage Tohoana had done. As I put together all the elements of the room, from the Apollonian guards and the strong bonds holding me, along with the savagery of the beating I’d received and what Dockrill had witnessed, I reached a tentative conclusion. He’d seen me fight. He’d seen me wounded. He’d seen me heal. He wanted to test my body. He had greater concerns than his moral obligation to the brethren.

            “I have an honored guest, whose name you apparently know,” Dockrill said, gesturing toward and bowing to Ella Cantor, who had not moved since assuming a regal posture at the foot of the cot. Her eyes never left me. My vision was too blurry to tell if she were even breathing. “Perhaps you will one day favor us with the story of how you came to know of her, but right now, I have other duties to attend to. I’m pleased that I saw you fight this morning. And I’m pleased that you remain strong and are healing quickly. You see, Garrett Cold, you are to be our entertainer this afternoon. We shall devise a means for you to demonstrate if you are still our brother. ”

            So he meant to test me. I felt some strange satisfaction at this, mixed with serious reservations. I doubted that even with my enhanced abilities I would be able to overcome all that Dockrill could throw at me. His entertainments were drawn out affairs, full of ceremony and ritual, but mostly extended blood-lettings with the outcome preordained. But Bradna’s words came back to me. “…to lead us, boy. To take the garrison and the town, and from there, the whole system.” If I survive the arena. I thought. You will, an answering thought said. I looked around me as if the speaker were in the room.

            “You seem agitated, Garrett Cold. Please don’t be. I’m going to be sure you’re rested and ready. You have a very important part to play. You’re far more important than you can possibly imagine. And now, if you’ll pardon me, I have other matters to see to,” Dockrill said, giving me a cursory nod before bowing deeply to Ella Cantor and leaving the room with Bradna and Tohoana trailing behind. Tohoana closed the door as she exited without giving me so much as a glance. What had she meant about losing many friends on SixKill Day?

            I’d learned one valuable bit of information from Dockrill. The day had moved on to afternoon. That meant it had been two and half standard days since SixKill ended. Sixty hours. I’d slept a good bit after the fight with Cypher so rest wasn’t an issue. Suddenly, despite the bruises and numbness, I was ravenously hungry.

            Ella Cantor remained unmoving at the foot of the cot for several moments after the door creaked shut. My vision was beginning to clear and I was able to get a good look at her for the first time. She was not tall, although she stood half a head above both Dockrill and Tohoana. Grampa would say she had remarkable proportions and I had to agree. Nothing overly large or small, and no one feature, other than perhaps her hair with its fantastic braiding, to divert the eye from the completeness of her. No, I decided, that wasn’t true. The woman, and that is truly how I thought of her, as the woman, radiated raw sexuality. I followed the curve of her neck to where the skin disappeared into the tan of the uniform, from there, the zipper line down the front met the narrow waist of the trousers, and it was there, at the apex of the space formed by her inner thighs that I found myself hypnotically focused, without any sense of wrongdoing or fear. She wanted me to look at her that way. She’s dangerous in ways you can’t imagine, the voice inside me warned once more.

            “Untie him,” she said. The voice was youthful, commanding, but without any emotion I could name. And it was the first time I’d heard it. That meant the seemingly long ago encounter with the LT at Bernies, the one who wore her hair in the same manner as Ella Cantor, had been with some other woman. Sheila Lasserhagen, I remembered the forgettable name that Digit’s protégé, the captain who had called on me early in the morning, had given. The dead protégé looking for the imposter LT, I thought. Something ironic here. I had become a militia impersonator too, as had Ella Cantor, although she wore no insignia, no identifying marks of any sort.

            The man to my right produced a small knife, perhaps it had been in his hand all along, and cut the cords. I didn’t move. If Ella Cantor wanted me to do something I wanted her to say it. Say anything. Her voice had the same effect as her presence, that is to say the strongest feeling in my body was in my loins. Chemical sterilization prevented pregnancies, not desire. When you stripped away all of the ugliness, sex was the primary commerce on Freelife Seven, or perhaps it was the essence of the ugliness, an impotent struggle to find enjoyment in being alive, producing nothing. There was nothing else from our former lives to cling to. At the moment, I was caught up in a whirlwind of confusing emotions. Interestingly, I still wasn’t afraid. But even the sLOD boss warned you about her.

            “Thank you would be the right thing to say just now, Marshall,” she said, only her mouth moving. Ripe lips. Fine strong teeth. I saw the tip of her tongue between her teeth when she said the word thing. It sent a rush of blood to my head and even though I was already lying down, I felt so dizzy that I imagined myself to be falling.

            “Of course, I’m s-sorry. Thank you.” I felt like I was fifteen and in the presence of a goddess, one who I’d fantasized about for my whole life. It was absurd, my brain said at some level. I quickly quashed that sort of talk.

            She gave her attention to my attendants.

            “Get him up. Cleanse him and bring him to sup with us. He needs feeding, that much is certain.” I nearly fainted at the stream of words. Was it a trick, a drug, some hypnotic suggestion working on me? If she ordered me to climb the Anglehorn, unhook, and leap headfirst to my death I’d only regret that I couldn’t do it a second time for her. She left the room as soon as she finished speaking and the three men remaining hurried to obey her. 

            After I was cleaned and dressed in a well-used but fresh pair of convict coveralls, my escorts led me through a warren of tunnels to a long room that I recognized as one of the Arena’s private dining halls. Convicts with the money could rent these spaces during their leave and enjoy reconstituted food that through some magic of spices and hokum, the residents of Dockrill’s Arena presented as a banquet.

            Carved out of solid stone deep beneath Leaveton, this room had been hung with crude tapestries made from the stitched together remnants of prison uniforms, many of which I suspected came from entertainers who had died in the Arena. Various dyes and paints were available in Leaveton, owing to the chemical and mineral richness of the asteroids and these tapestries portrayed a psychedelic kaleidoscope of images that seemed to shimmer like rainbow-hued waves in the glow of the oil lanterns placed on pillars of various heights occupying the corners of the room.

            A long table of stacked stones with a concrete top filled the middle of the space and four long benches flanked it. A metal chair with a cushion, a real luxury outside of the garrison, was set at the table’s head and it was to this that I was led and seated. Ella was not present when my escorts seated me. I thought perhaps she had decided not to join me as she certainly wouldn’t be expected to stand or sit on the hard, backless benches.

            During the time between Ella’s departure and my arrival at the dining hall, I’d willingly surrendered my body to the ministrations of the minions, as I now thought of the three giants. They never spoke, but moved in tandem in a performance that I felt had been rehearsed and played hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times.

            I found myself appreciating the silence as the past two days on Freelife Seven had overrun my senses to a point that, to use a spacer’s cliché, I really felt as if I didn’t know which way was up. Something extraordinary had definitely taken place within my body over the course of this time. Whether it was related to my past crime, the synthetic marrow filling my bones, the drugs Tohoana had given me, or Grampa’s nano-tech based ear treatment, my natural healing abilities seemed exponentially better than at any previous time in my life. Enhanced, that’s what Cypher said, although he was quoting Digit, which reminded me that information had suddenly become a commodity to be valued in the system. But it was also the most suspect, the most susceptible to “falterations of veracity,” another of Grampa’s pithy made up phrases, and nearly everything I was getting was second or third hand. Actual experience is the only real proof of anything, I knew that from a long lineage of sages in a wide-ranging pantheon of divine utterances. Ironically, the greatest wisdom in a culture without any gods came from the dead echoes of the psychological defectives who’d sworn to the existence of such supernatural meaning.

            The golden-haired Adonis’s lifted me from the battered and filthy cot and carried me like a crucified saint into an antechamber the opening of which was behind a tapestry at the back of the cell.  They dunked me into a warm gray water pool with a high saline content and let me soak until I became chilled. A rub with fragrant oils followed, and various salves were applied to the abrasions and cuts on my skin. Several times I saw the men look at one another and I guessed they were silently wondering at how I was so quickly restored. I guessed this because it was what I wondered about. By the time they dressed me the swelling around my eyes had diminished to be almost unnoticeable, and even the deepest bruises were only mildly tender. As to the knife wound below my right knee, only a faint white line like a much older scar, remained.

            By the time we headed into the labyrinthine passages of the Arena on our way to the dining room, I realized that I might be well enough to put on a good show. My mind drifted back to the early morning hours in Bernie’s when Post and Morrischenko had tag-teamed me into unconsciousness. I’d imagined putting up a good fight then too.  Dockrill wouldn’t stop at just two fighters, and being bludgeoned senseless in the first moments wasn’t likely either. No, his entertainments were true spectacles, worthy of the Roman Coliseum of old. I imagined Dockrill as having learned his trade in the sLOD offices. Keeping the masses entertained, diverting the general population from matters of economics and politics in their day to day existence, had been a huge part of the sLOD rise to power. Dockrill seemed to me a master at such skills, even on a prison planet with a militia garrison at the outskirts of his realm. Even in a place where power such as I now saw he owned was absolutely forbidden. I should have spent more time in the quarter.

            It occurred to me that Dockrill had been around long enough to have prepared for this day, if he had the intelligence network to know what the sLOD and Rheynstadt were up to. This made for an interesting configuration of forces, a triangle of opposing ambitions, yet all were bound by certain commonalities. Each needed a sizable labor force, food, sanitary facilities, and shelter. Without these, they would be dependent on outsiders, perhaps even subject to them, and suddenly it clicked in my head. These were the very elements at the core of a fully terraformed planet. They were the ultimate goal of the work Grampa had engaged in for decades. I almost shouted out when the thought fully formed in my head. Rheynstadt wanted Grampa alive. He wouldn’t let Bundy kill him because he needed his expertise.

            All of the various combatants in this developing war could use a man like him, I thought. Both on a personal and a galactic scale, what was in his head and the experience in his hands was precisely the thing to give one party an upper hand in the engagement that now seemed inevitable.

Of course there were thousands of variables, hundreds of which were significant. To what degree had the militia been disbanded? Were the great battle cruisers all mothballed? How far did sLOD influence truly reach? And what could Dockrill gain by seizing control of the Freelife system? Possibilities whirled as I sat at the empty table, feeling my bones and skin mend and my mind come alive, not with confusion, but with a purpose that had been right in front of me all along. I would free myself and those I cared about. What exactly I would free them from, and who exactly was on the list of folks I truly cared for were like a fogged mirror at the moment, but so much had come clear in these past hours that I began to trust my own inner voices again. I might have been lied to, deceived, used, manipulated, and misled for decades, maybe even for my whole life. But it was because at some level I had surrendered my own ability to choose, to decide, to act in accordance with what best served whatever meaning I could find in a brutal, small existence, that of a single human life – how tiny a thing it is, how fragile, how insignificant, and yet, how wondrously beautiful and exquisite in the experiencing of it. I shook my head and was still aglow with the feeling when the double doors of the dining hall opened on hinges that sounded like breaking teeth and Ella Cantor, along with Dockrill Costello and a legion of servant-convicts entered the space.

Was it chance or something pre-destined, by man or god, that I should have these revelations in the same hour that I first met Ella Cantor? She’s dangerous, Garrett. More dangerous than you can imagine. I’d forgotten the rest of the sLOD boss’s warning. At the moment I saw her enter the dining hall, none of that mattered. “Take him to sup with us,” she’d said. She was Dockrill’s honored guest, and I was present at her invitation. I smiled at that memory.

She was laughing at something Dockrill said as they entered the hall.  Patting his thin forearm with one hand while massaging a wiry but tiny biceps with the one clinging to him, she pulled him gently to the side as four convicts removed the benches, placing two more chairs identical to the one in which I sat on the long side of the table to my right. Ella took the seat nearest to me, still laughing while Dockrill held his face in the wry smile that spoke of secrets kept close that would greatly amuse him to reveal, but that had more power for their being unspoken as he sat in the second chair.

She still wore her uniform and the complex weave of her hair gleamed in the bright light of a dozen torches set about the room.

My escorts remained at their stations, one on either side and one behind me. Whatever had befallen the rest of Leaveton, as far as I could tell, life in the Arena was essentially unchanged. More than two dozen dishes were laid on the long table along with jugs of what smelled like actual wine rather than the rotgut liquor that was Freelife’s stock-in-trade. The smells emanating from the covered dishes caused me to think I’d been given hallucinogens. Lamb, pork, and buffalo, root vegetables including the rare Boleyn root from the Tudor Moon bearing the same name, along with a visible assortment of sweet and sticky deserts, puddings, and cakes reactivated the appetite that I’d half-forgotten during the ministrations of the minions. I supposed that Rheynstadt might be able to organize such a banquet in the garrison but the cost and difficulty of it would have made it a once in a lifetime thing and the risks might have been too great even for someone as reckless as he seemed to me to be.

Ella and Dockrill ignored me, speaking in low voices and in a language I did not know. I found my ignorance surprising as Grampa had made it part of my education to recognize all of the principle languages of the galaxy before I was ten. Those who had left humanity’s home needed a common language and it was only fifteen centuries and the settling of seventy worlds that had led to local and regional dialects emerging in a few cultures. Ella continued to laugh occasionally and Dockrill wore his amused grin except when he spoke to her. Then he lowered his eyes and his face went soft. He replied tentatively, as best I could tell, and paused frequently as if gauging her reaction. He seemed almost fearful. It was a curious relationship at best, one to instigate numerous and diverse questions in the mind of any observer.

When the last of the food had been delivered, a fourth chair was brought in and placed at my left, centered across from Dockrill and Ella. It’s the seat I would have assigned for me, being the weakest in terms of exposing the occupant’s back to the door of the room. This seat had shorter legs and no cushion, so that Dockrill and Ella would look directly down on our final guest.

Dockrill picked up a wicker wrapped bottle and poured an amber liquid into a silver lined mug which he passed to Ella. She did the same for him and both then looked at one another before raising their mugs in a toast to the empty chair.

“To absent friends,” Ella said.

“Long may they be remembered,” Dockrill replied. Ella nodded approvingly and Dockrill sat up straighter.

They quaffed the mugs and threw them at the chair. Sound clattered in the high hollows of the chamber, painfully ringing in my formerly damaged ear.

“Close your mouth, Garrett Cold,” Dockrill commanded. “You look like a dead fish.”

“A tiny dead fish,” Ella said significantly and both burst into laughter.

I forced myself to smile and with a conscious acknowledgement that this little dig was nothing to go to battle over, shut my jaws.

“We begin our festivities with a toast to those who have gone on ahead of us to the completion of their journeys,” Dockrill explained. “We throw the cups because sometimes the spirits of the departed come to join us.”

“We don’t care for that at all,” Ella added. “Stay dead! All of you!” she shouted to the ceiling and fell to laughing so that her head tilted toward Dockrill and her marvelous hair tumbled over his sunken chest and arms. I thought about his bragging that he’d carried me on his shoulders while dragging Cassandra to the Arena and wondered if it wasn’t a false boast.

I also thought Ella Cantor might be very, very drunk.

“We’d invite you to join us for the next round, Garrett Cold,” Dockrill said, “But I understand that your most recent friend clings to life, so there would be no one for you to toast too.”

I sat up and looked at him, mouthing Cassie’s name without breath so that he saw it. He nodded and then with a quick glance at Ella said, “Come on, lad. It’s a celebration tonight. In your honor I might add. We want you to speak. Nothing to fear here. Open those jaws and talk. And say, aren’t the Muses wonderful for healing what ails you. Why to look at you I’d never guess you were the same battered flesh. Still, it’s the inner man that matters most. How is the inner man feeling? Come on, lad. The lady is enchanted with you. Speak.”

I looked at Ella Cantor who was gazing back toward the door, appearing completely uninterested in the interaction between us. She held her palm to her mouth briefly although I couldn’t know if she were suppressing a yawn or as is common in some cultures, suppressing her urge to speak, a politeness required of women in those rare, unenlightened worlds. To think that the most savage criminal in the galaxy might have been born of such a place wasn’t such a stretch. But to think she’d maintain the pose without it serving some dark purpose was ludicrous. I was too smitten with her presence to give it much thought. I sniffed the air and turned to the Muses.

“I’m grateful to these men. They took very good care of me.”

“Well of course they did, boy. If they hadn’t, the lady here would have fixed them so they wouldn’t need those loincloths. No modesty when what you’re hiding gets yanked out at the root.”

Ella turned her head rapidly so that her hair swirled out in a flourish, like a skirt of spun gold. Her eyes, large, clear, and deep sky blue settled on me. I thought I could feel the weight of her gaze, a look that was more like a magnetic pull, as if she had drawn very near. I saw her rise from her chair to stand beside me, lowering the zipper on her uniform blouse.

“Tell me the secret within you, Garrett Cold, and I will give myself to you,” she said. Or so I imagined. For it wasn’t real. I blinked and she was still seated, looking at the door. I’d had nothing to eat or drink and this time she turned, deliberately, and spoke directly in Dockrill. “He must eat, Dockrill. We have plenty of time for talking.”

Dockrill nodded and the convicts began to uncover the dishes. If I was hungry before, the scents filling that hall nearly drove me mad so that I wanted to leap headfirst from my chair into the center of the feast. To wallow in the excess of it, eating until my stomach burst and then be drowned in the sweetness of the wines and liqueurs before falling asleep with the sticky remains of a crumble cake in my closed hands.

A single bite of each of the many dishes was cut and placed on a separate plate in front of the empty chair and three convicts, bound and held tightly by six others, were marched into the room and given these bits, which they accepted most willingly. Dockrill watched intently as each man chewed and swallowed one food at a time until the plate was empty and the hungry eyes of each looked at the huge remains on the platters.

“Well, we shan’t have the pleasure of seeing poison at work this meal, or so it seems,” Dockrill said, waving the tasters and their guards out with a dismissive flourish of his hand.

Now food was served all around and Ella, Dockrill, and I ate with considerable gusto. Although I couldn’t resist stealing frequent glances at Ella, feeling thoroughly elated at the sight of pink morsels of flesh passing her lips to be thoughtfully chewed and swallowed, I tried to remember what table manners meant. Dockrill had no such concern, quickly tossing aside the silver flatware and using his hands to scoop mixtures of greens and meat into his surprisingly large mouth while leering at both of us. He was missing teeth and he let food freely fall down the front of his uniform, asking loudly for seconds and thirds on some of the rarer roasts and pieces of fowl.

He seemed quite insane, frenzied in his eating but so docile when speaking directly with Ella.

After a time, I too became consumed by the need to just eat. Finishing the final bite on my fourth plate of food, I found both Ella and Dockrill sitting with their hands folded in their laps and gazing expectantly at me.

“And how was your meal, laddie?” Dockrill asked, his knowing smirk now grease-rimmed and filled with crumbs.

“It was…” I gulped and nearly choked on the last bit of sweet cake in my mouth before taking a long drink from the nearest wine jug, “Marvelous. But how is it that you can provide such a feast?” Knowing the system to be devoid of animal life, I couldn’t imagine how he’d managed it.

Dockrill laughed, perhaps a bit too long and loud to convince me of his sincerity, or he may have just been drunk. “There are many ways to live life, Garrett Cold. Many purveyors who will willingly give you whatever you ask if you understand the summa of existence.”

“Dockrill, please, don’t be obtuse today. Tell the boy.”

It was strange to hear Ella Cantor call me boy. She was five or maybe even ten years younger than me.

“Oh, all right. We get it from the militia, well, from the garrison pantry. In return for certain favors, Colonel Rheynstadt allows us a few scraps from his table. There are one or two passable chefs in my stable but it’s Rheynstadt who provides the raw material. The colonel and I go back a long ways, laddie. Back to the days when there were two habitable planets in this system.”

The first thought I had in response to this remarkable assertion was that Dockrill was lying. Both he and Ella were looking at me as if I were naïve as a child somehow transported from ten thousand years ago to the present day, one who would view everything as miraculous and doubt nothing after seeing the first technological marvel. This dangerous supposition was quickly followed by an anxious thought – if Dockrill were telling the truth, then he might be, no, he most certainly was an undercover militia man. Like Digit. Was Rheynstadt playing cat and mouse with me? Had he allowed me to escape and if so, to what end? Dockrill passed his wine jug to me.

            “You look like you need a drink, Garrett Cold. Try mine, yours is empty.”

            “Do either of you know a militia man called Dominicus Akyron?”

            Dockrill’s smile vanished and he looked at me in a way that plainly indicated he suddenly took me far more seriously.

            “Aye, I know him. Digit, you mean. Seems you have a talent for discovering names you ought not to know. How’d you ken that one?”

            “I thought he might be a comrade of yours.” 

            Dockrill was out of his chair so suddenly that I had almost no time to react before he took a cut at my throat with a short hooked knife. I managed to push my chair over backwards so that the blade missed by millimeters. His momentum carried him over with me and had the Muses not intervened, grabbing me, Dockrill, and the knife in their huge hands, I’m sure the old Arena master would have carved me into jerky strips.

            “Ah, let him fight his own fights. He can handle it. I saw him kill Cypher Hegemon this morning as easy as throwing a dart at a board. This whelp needs taming, now let me go!”

            But I had only barely been quick enough to dodge Dockrill’s blade. My recovery either wasn’t yet complete or I’d been slowed by the combination of the heavy meal and prodigious drinking. None of the lightning reflexes and herculean strength of my fight against Cypher and the Sarconian were at my disposal during this conflict. The Muses held us until Dockrill settled down, but only after he’d let loose a long string of invective and curses, demanded and received an apology from me, and sworn a terrible oath to cut out my liver and eat it raw before my dying eyes if I ever suggested that he’d ingratiated himself to Digit or any other militia spy.

            “My dealings with the militia are all above board. Value is exchanged for value. I’ve not said or done anything to lead you to think otherwise, and I won’t have you jumping to conclusions like that without evidence. Don’t be a flighty paranoid you stupid boy. I’ll gut you if you do, I swear it, enhancements or no, I’ll trim my bed with your bowels and fuck your corpse until even hell won’t want it.”

            From Ella Cantor’s chair we both heard a suppressed laugh. Dockrill shook off the Muse who held him, glared at the one holding his knife, and returned to his seat as Ella burst out into a full-throated laugh.

            “You boys, really, if you’re going to fight, let’s have it be about something that matters. And don’t forget, you’re both on the same side.” She looked right at me. “I mean it Garrett, Dockrill is your greatest ally for what is coming to this system.” She no longer seemed drunk or even mildly intoxicated. I looked at her closely, expecting to see signs of stim use. There were none.

            “And what’s coming?” I wanted her to tell me. I wanted her to show me. I felt an eagerness to be an insider with her that I couldn’t begin to explain, except that when she talked or looked my way it felt as if my whole body had been connected to an electric generator with the outgoing power line plugged into my genitals.

            Ella looked at Dockrill who motioned to Bradna Cucrow, standing silently aside during the meal. He had a long document tube slung over his back and he moved to the foot of the table looking uncertainly at the remains of our feasting.

            “Oh for sLOD’s sake!” Dockrill growled, shoving everything off the table in a great clatter of breaking dishes. “The rest of you, clean it up. Your brains are flaccid. Think you’d never served anyone before, dismal slack-dicked…”

            Ella put a hand on his arm and spoke again in the strange language they’d shared before the meal. Dockrill quieted down and motioned again to Bradna, who opened the tube, removing and unrolling a stack of long charts on the tabletop. I knew the top one at a glance; it was a navigator’s overview map of the galaxy – an old one from the look of it. The charts Grampa had back on Thebes were all dated from the time of his retirement, when the last wave of terraforming had finished. A third of the space between humanity’s first home and our remote colony contained the seventy habitable planets, with Thebes being the furthest out. But this chart had only one other planet, the military-industrial center of human life, first terra-formed world, and the capital of the sLOD Empire. I noted the date on the chart; it showed the galaxy as it had looked more than a thousand years ago.

            Dockrill’s lips curled back revealing the crooked and imperfect teeth remaining in his mouth. For some reason they reminded me of the Anglehorn ridge visible above the broken down wall where I’d killed Cypher.

            “This is the way it was when I was born, laddie. Nothing but Earth and Mars to hold the whole human race. We were mining the asteroid belt around Sol when Hal Wright turned out the first FTL drive and began talking about seeding other worlds.”

“You knew Hal Wright?” This was some joke. Dockrill claiming to know a man dead and gone for more than a thousand years.

“Aye, that I did. He was a bit of a playboy, that one. Had too much money and too little education, spending most of both on damsels and rich food. But he was a visionary in that one important respect. Seeding life on other worlds. He called the ball and stuck the landing.”

            I’d heard this story from Grampa many times, about the economic, political, and military turmoil that led to the first terraforming missions. It was a bloody story and one that had more darkness than light if looked at without seeing the outcome. But at the end, we had the seventy worlds, a place where basic needs were seldom a concern and where now, at last, peace had prevailed for more than a century. I didn’t want to be rude to my host, especially as he’d already tried to kill me once, but I wasn’t sure I could bear to hear another meaningless history lesson.

            “I can see I’m boring you, Garrett Cold.” Dockrill nodded to Bradna who pulled the first chart back. “So, take a look at this and tell me if it don’t get your juices stirred up just a wee bit more.”

            When the second chart was revealed, I at first didn’t comprehend what I was looking at. Ella Cantor, who had been silently watching me, now rose to her feet and moved to the opposite side of the table where the convicts had just finished clearing the floor of the broken dishes and scraps of food. A strong smell of alcohol and burnt animal flesh filled the room, but through it, I again noticed a hint of jasmine. The small chamber was warming up from all the human bodies crowding it and I wanted to stand and stretch my legs too.

            Ella Cantor never took her eyes off me. “Why don’t you stand here, Marshall. You’ll see things much more clearly from this side of the table.”

            I nearly refused, at least I’d like to think I did, but of course I was out of my chair and beside her in an instant, without even checking Dockrill’s reaction. It occurred to me that I really would fly off the Anglehorn without giving it any thought at all if she asked me to.

            What I was seeing was the map Grampa had drawn, only this one was complete and extended outward to the north a great distance. Every feature of the North Quarter had been meticulously sketched and labeled, most of it in Grampa’s tightly controlled block letters. It appeared that someone else had recently noted the destruction of the shelters, and the odd angle of that printing I found quite unsettling. I knelt down and the jasmine smell disappeared into the oily scent of the scratcheen paper, another great innovation for living in space. The surface of scratcheen required nothing so primitive as pen or pencil to mark it. Pressure from a round, metal stylus was sufficient and rubbing it on any flat surface with a cloth would erase unwanted marks.

            This map showed the many canyons to the north of Leaveton. The locations of the useless attempts to mine the planet were also noted with kilometers to the garrison and the Arena indicated for each one. But the most extraordinary markings were those between the mine entrances, a densely detailed series of what could only be tunnels, underground chambers, and a mysterious round structure labeled simply “V6.” I also noted a dashed line running straight from there to the center of the Arena. All in all, the space was four or five times the area of Leaveton and the garrison combined. An underground city with many mysteries.

            “It’s an ambitious plan,” I said, wondering how Dockrill intended to pull it off.

            “Well, yes. It’s actually quite a bit more than a plan, laddie. It’s nearly completed.”

            Dockrill might as well have spoken the unrecognizable language he and Ella had been using. It was as impossible as his being born more than a millennium ago, but I wasn’t about to call him a liar. For one thing, the muse had given him back his knife. For another, after seeing Ella Cantor, eating the impossible feast, and beginning to comprehend the changes that had occurred throughout the system in the past few hundred hours, I might be stunned into non-comprehension, but I knew that the unbelievable had already become real in more ways than anyone in the softie worlds I’d come from would have thought possible. Besides, it would explain how Ella had disappeared from the garrison and reappeared in Leaveton. She’d used the tunnels.

            “I’d like to see it,” I said. “And I’d really like to know what you intend to do with it.”

            “Me? Nothing. I didn’t build it. It’s been here for almost a century, hidden of course. But now that its found, something needs to be done.”

“Who found it?”

“Rheynstadt. Miss Cantor here helped him.”

            “And now we want you to help us destroy it,” Ella said, putting her hand on my forearm.

            I froze, swallowed hard, blinked several times, and looked down. Her fingertips rested so lightly that they might have just touched the tips of the hairs growing from my skin. Her palm was warm, dry, and filled me with a surge of desire so that I clenched both fists in an attempt to prevent my acting on that feeling.

            “Look at me, Marshall,” she said, removing her hand. I did. “I’m asking this because it is the only way to stop the annihilation of this world. Amos was kind enough to give us his formula for blast. And I believe you know how to put such a formula to use, to give us enough of the stuff to cave-in the whole complex.”

            I was breathless, but every question that had been clamoring for my attention over these past days now shouted inside my mind. Deliberately, I turned my back on both Ella and Dockrill and went to stand behind the chair where I’d enjoyed the finest meal of my life. My hosts both watched me, and I felt the Muse’s eyes heavy on my shoulders as well. Even the convicts still in attendance stopped moving, their eyes averted but their ears certainly wide open, listening for what I would say. Who was I that such an air of expectancy and anticipation should form around my response? The sLOD boss, the militia, the intelligence forces, the convicts, and now the most evil and beautiful woman in all of creation, along with a mad man who seemed to hold the world under his thumb, all wanted me to take on a task that seemed like the ultimate suicide trip. If the structure drawn on the chart was even real.

            Perhaps the whole world had gone insane and me with it, I thought. Or perhaps you’ve arrived at the destination that you’ve been journeying toward all your life.

            “Before I answer, I need to know what is really going on here. Rheynstadt, the sLOD, all of it.”

            Dockrill’s eyes immediately turned to Ella, even as his face tightened into the most fearsome and determined expression I had ever seen on a man. Ella’s gaze never left mine, but her posture relaxed, as if she knew what my response would be all along.

            “All right, but there is a condition to our telling you.” She was smiling now. It was the same smile Bundy had when contemplating his interrogation of Grampa. She was stimulated by my reticence, at least that’s how it seemed. Don’t trust her. Be careful. Be careful, you fool!

            “Everything has conditions, whether we’re able to see them or not,” I said. Another of Amos famous sayings. It seemed apropos here.

            She nodded and lifted the flap on a pocket in the trousers of her uniform. From it she extracted a radio, just like the one’s I’d used. She powered it on and set it on top of the charts. I tried to keep my face still but I’m certain I frowned and gave a glance at the device when I realized it was on and there was no hiss, no hum, no static.

            “He’s ready, your grace,” she said without taking her eyes from mine. “Go ahead, Garrett Cold. We’ll answer all of your questions. But here’s the condition: you will help us or you will die in this room and no one will ever know what became of you.”

            Dockrill made a small animal sound in his throat. I looked from him to Bradnas, who shrugged his shoulders and smiled before lowering his head to gaze intently at the floor.

            It was, I thought, the first time someone had threatened to kill me without my thinking it would be a public event. From being flayed and baked to jerky on the Anglehorn to having my broken corpse left in the middle of the North Quarter with a flagpole in my asshole, I’d only thought of death in terms of a grand conclusion. Even the numerous dangers Grampa had put me in all promised some notoriety in the act of becoming extinct. Eaten by a cougar on the perfectly terra-formed retirement world of Thebes certainly would have resulted in some ironic reflections on the part of those who knew me and Grampa. But to be simply disposed of, invisibly, like the remains of the grand feast now swept into waste bins by anonymous convicts, that seemed somehow more significant to me than any threat ever made. And she had, it seemed, an interstellar radio with a channel to someone she called “your grace.” That term belonged only to one type of being in the human race. A sLOD was listening on the other end of the connection.

            “We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Dockrill said. “Time to decide, boy.” I whirled to face him.

            “What did you say?”

            “Time to decide, boy.”

            “You look as if you’ve seen the dead walk, Garrett Cold,” Ella offered.

            “My Gram…never mind.” I took in a deep breath. Nodding as I exhaled, I agreed to the conditions. I’d gotten myself into an untenable position. I already knew too much, I was sure, for them to let me leave even if I refused to help and gave up my demand for full disclosure. “That radio, why do you have it?”

            “We all have them,” Ella answered. Dockrill produced an identical item from inside his coveralls as did Bradna Cucrow. “We tried to get one to you too, but Rheynstadt acted more quickly than we’d anticipated.”

            “Who is we?”

            It was Bradna Cucrow, who had been quiet for longer than I thought possible, who answered, as if waiting for the question all through the feast and the discussion that followed.

            “What’s the name of your unit, Private Parvenu? Your militia squad.”

            “I’m not in the militia.”

            “Oh, but you are. You took the oath, remember? You’re wearing the uniform. You fought side by side with militia troops in the streets of Leaveton. You’re blooded. What is the name of your unit?”

            “The…the Freedom Keepers.”

            Bradna nodded, raising his lower lip with a satisfied nod.

            “As are we all. Convict, sLOD, and soldier fall away in the protection of that which allows humanity to survive. Freedom to think, speak, and act for the advancement of our species. We are Freedom Keepers too.”

            “As are we all,” Dockrill, Bradna, and Ella all said in unison.

            “As are we all,” said a voice from the doorway. There, supported by two more of the golden-haired Muses, was Cassandra Caggonar.

            “LT,” I said, moving to help her but one of the Muses blocked my way and Cassie, pale and clearly unable to stand without aid raised a death-white palm and shook her head.

            “I’m only here to be sure you understand that everything you think you know, unless you know it from first-hand experience, is not to be relied on. If you trust me, and you should because I saved you from Cypher by distracting him long enough for you to kill him, then you must learn to see everything anew. Except you may trust these three,” she said, nodding weakly to Bradna, Dockrill, and bowing her head towards Ella.

            “What about Amos?” I asked.

            “If Amos survives, he may be worthy of your trust.” I thought again about Tohoana invoking my relationship to Amos and the loss of her friends on SixKill before she beat me.

            “And the sLOD?”

            “There is only one sLOD, Garrett.” The voice came from the radios, clear and recognizable as if he were in the room with us. “I am the only one.” It was the voice I’d taken instruction from for eight years. And what it just said made absolutely no sense. I opened my mouth to ask a question but in that same moment Cassie’s eyes grew wide, her mouth opened as if gasping for air, and her hands came together on her chest. She never drew that final breath, her entire weight sagging in the arms of her Muses as life, the invisible and precious force without which nothing exists, left her to eternity.