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

 

 

Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers

 

Chapter Ten – The Engineer

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Grampa, what happened?”

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

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

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

“Never mind. You said I killed him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t say that, Grampa.”

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

“Who is he, Grampa, really?”

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

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

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

“Did you believe him?”

“What? No, how could I.”

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

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

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

“When did all of this happen?”

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

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

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

“To whom, boy?”

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

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

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

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

“Back to Dockrill’s chart,” I said

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

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

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

“In a manner of speaking.”

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

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

“I did. And you know it.”

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

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

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

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

“Then what, who is he?”

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

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

“He sounds like Rheynstadt.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just tell me, Grampa.”

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

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

“How long has this gone on?”

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

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

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

“How do you know this?”

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

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

“What,” I said through gritted teeth.

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

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

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

“Just promise me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Grampa, you knew my father.”

“I was there when he died.”

“Where is there?”

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

“You were on Freelife Six? What happened?”

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

“Grampa.”

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

“And the story about Rural Caggonar?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You said he was militia.”

“Did I?”

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

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

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

“Grampa, can you wiggle your toes?”

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

“So your back is really…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tohoana. Where are you?”

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

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

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

“Tohoana, are you hurt?”

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

“Your people?”

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

“We’re dead, boy.”

“Why?” I whispered back.

“Hear that accent?”

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Fuck me, Grampa,” I said aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

“My mother.”

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

“Why Thebes?”

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

“Look at my — charts.”

“My mother? Is she on Thebes.”

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

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

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

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

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

 

Garrett Cold and Liberty Keepers -- Chapter Nine, The Anvil

 

 

Garrett Cold and the Liberty Keepers

Chapter Nine – The Anvil

 

            “You planning to stare that iron into shape, Garrett?” I was ten-years-old, holding a two kilo sledge in my bare left hand. The blistered fingers of my right hand ached where I held the black metal tongs. Just minutes earlier I’d learned an important lesson about why you don’t wear gloves when working with hot metal. Now I stood at the anvil, the waves of red light from the heated metal glowing brilliantly through my protective goggles. I was trying to describe the color in words, silently of course. Grampa didn’t care much for idle talk in the shop and if he’d known I was still in art class, at least in my mind, he’d probably have banned me for another year. “I was eight when I learned this trade, boy. Of course in my day boys grew up faster,” he’d told me over breakfast.

            We lived alone on the ranch. No women, no resident hired help. Grampa had retired from terraforming for the third time two Standard Years previous, having finished up work on Thebes, his greatest achievement. Now we were ranchers, farmers, and smiths, along with demolitions and wildlife experts on the most nearly independent of the Seventy Worlds. My parents, who I never knew, were “dead, gone, forgotten and best left that way if you know what’s good for you” Grampa had said the only time I ventured to wonder aloud about my origins. I don’t know why I let that go so easily. Maybe it was because Grampa’s attention to my upbringing was so present, so consuming of my time and energy that I didn’t have room for what to most must seem an almost inescapable curiosity.

            Getting back to the roots of existence was a phrase Grampa used to answer questions about how he planned to spend his retirement. That I would be a conscript, a forever volunteer and eventual heir to his nostalgia was assumed, not just by Grampa but by the whole population of Thebes. Amos Albert Cold was something of a celebrity. He didn’t discover the place, but Thebes would have been just another of Seventy mostly habitable worlds had he not taken such a personal interest in her. She was his bride and his matron, the only place he could breathe without looking longingly up at the distant stars, seeking a greener place to plant his flag.

            When we lay in the meadow grass on the warm summer evenings, far distant from the glow of spaceports and towns, with rolling hills and miles of living forest and thriving lakes between our ranch and anything resembling the dense populations of the ‘softies’ who made up most of the Seventy Worlds during my childhood, Grampa looked at the twinkling lights of distant suns with the satisfaction of a man who has compared his home to everyplace else in creation and found it all wanting.

            Cherry red, fire red, scarlet red, sunset red, barbecue red, prairie fire red, lava red, volcanic red, toxic red, angry red, whip-welt red, blistered red, insane clown red, heart red, whole red, explosive red, effusive red – the litany of colors danced in my mind as I mentally compared each to the metal bar lying uneasily on the anvil in silent anticipation of my first swing with the sledge.

            I felt Grampa’s huge hand on my right elbow, smelled the pine scent of his shirt – he’d been splitting kindling for an hour before dawn – his tobacco-sweet breath ranging over my shoulder. “Go ahead. Just remember what I told you. Swing for the anvil not the steel.”

            He told me a lot more than that. Hold the sledge near the end of the handle, double-tie the knot in my apron, a gas-fired forge is a detonation waiting to happen. All of these and a hundred more cautions, patiently explained to me over the course of five years, four of which I’d spent atop a cinder block wall that divided the rest of the shop from the bare earth square where the anvil sat centered in a meter wide concrete disk.

            “A dirt floor doesn’t vibrate, unlike man-made surfaces. It’s quieter and it makes for more accurate work when you’re forging. Now get the broom and sweep the shop,” he’d told me twice a week during those days before I was big enough, both mentally and physically, to handle the sledge and form the myriad of shapes that were the skilled smith’s stock in trade.

            Following my ninth birthday he’d assigned me a few small chores inside the sacred space where the forge roared and the sparks of violent blows filled the thick, ash-laden air. Bringing him tools, sorting raw steel into bins and buckets, polishing the cold anvil top, and filling the tempering trough with grey water until I could do these things with my eyes closed were the start of my apprenticeship. From there, he taught me how to light the forge, how to test the temperature and how to shut the fire down. This last task I learned to do both slowly, at the end of a day’s work, and rapidly, as one would in the event of an emergency. He taught me the proper way to use an extinguisher, lighting fires of various materials and timing me as I removed the heavy cylinder from the wall, broke the seal, and directed the dry chemical spray onto the flames, and then watching as he mixed powder and liquid to recharge the emptied tank. I learned to smother a flame with a blanket too, in case an extinguisher malfunctioned, and how to salve burns.

            My tenth year came and went and two weeks after we celebrated my birthday by digging a hundred-meter trench to irrigate a row of potatoes and onions, Grampa told me it was time I learned a useful trade. “Until you figure out what that is, ‘smithing will have to do,” he said with a rare smile. He believed that handwork was the only honest labor. Calluses and blisters were badges of honor. Aching muscles and grime caked so thick that one’s face became unrecognizable were proof of effort. We dug the trench by hand. Blacksmithing seemed to me a day’s rest by comparison.

            I still had several lessons to learn. He would have gladly verbalized his knowledge, but in blacksmithing, as in most things, I had to digest information the hard way, by personal and often painful experience.

            He strongly advised against my wearing gloves when working with hot metal. “Use the tongs and nothing else,” he’d warned, but as in most dangerous activities, he never forbade me from making my own choices, so long as I could explain them. “Show me you at least thought about this damn fool thing you’re about to do,” he’d insist each time. He could have told me what he based his concerns on, but I think he’d decided long ago that winning an argument with words didn’t really prove a thing. That left open the possibility that his words wouldn’t be heeded. I was good with words.

            “We wear the apron to protect our nether parts,” I’d said, repeating him. “And ensure that when the time comes we’re able to enjoy their use in creating progeny.” At eight, I didn’t fully understand what that particular expression meant, but Grampa always said it as he put his apron on. “I figure the same ought to be true for our fingers and forearm.” Grampa’s left arm was pitted and scarred like the face of some airless rock, battered by the meteor crashes of bits of red hot metal that flew outward from the ringing blows of the sledge. “So, I’m going to wear a glove.”

            “Suit yourself,” he shrugged, tossing me the heavy cotton gauntlet with its leather palm and finger patches.

            My first assignment as a true apprentice was to make a masonry chisel. It was a common enough tool with an octagonal shaft three centimeters in diameter and a tempered blade that was used to score and break brick and rock for building everything from garden walls and barbecue pits to habitable buildings.

            I don’t know if Grampa was prescient or if the universe possesses an unseen intelligence that indulges the young and foolish by giving them the exact thing they seek to avoid as an object lesson in heeding the advice of older and wiser beings. Of course each time a boy gets a chance to prove he’s a man his mind instantly elevates him to the smartest male that ever lived. Or so I thought.

            The tongs had a fine coat of silicone on them to prevent rust in the humid Theban summer. I wiped them carefully before reaching for the heated steel bar. I didn’t want anything flammable clinging to the metal as the combustion of such matter might quickly spread up the handles and onto my flesh. Although I’d watched Grampa pull hot metal from the forge more than a thousand times, holding it low and away from his body as he carried it the two steps to the anvil, I proudly lifted my arm, intending to give Grampa a better look at the perfect shade of impact red I’d achieved through leaving the piece in just the right amount of time.

            “Watch out,” was all Grampa managed to say before the heavy bar slipped backward out of the tongs, heading for my gloved hand and arm. I dropped the tongs, which probably saved me from far more serious injury, but the red-hot steel still hit the glove, striking the knuckle at the base of my index finger and rolling across my thumb joint before falling to the floor where a cloud of foul-smelling smoke rose from the deaths of billions of soil bacteria. The glove immediately caught fire, and by the time my hand plunged into the water trough I’d suffered second-degree burns over a third of it. Had I been hit by the bar without the glove I’d still have been burned, but over a much smaller area for a shorter period of time and certainly no more severely than my insistence on wearing the glove had led me to experience.

            “Just hold your hand down in there for a bit,” Grampa said. “It won’t help a damned thing as far as the burns go, but at least it will give you time to think about what you did.”

            Grampa believed that mistakes were an essential part of learning. He also believed that fear, if encouraged, killed more chances for lessons than just about anything else. As soon as I stopped wailing he had me pull my hand out of the trough, pulled the remnants of the glove free, inspected the burns, which he pronounced as being less than fatal, and sprayed them with a freezing compound that took away most of the sting. He then had me pick up the tongs, clean them once more, and begin again to forge my first tool.

            “Can’t have you afraid of old Jack,” he said, invoking a name belonging to a dragon in a storybook I’d enjoyed when I’d first started reading. All hot things, the forge included, traced back to old Jack in Grampa’s and my private language. “He bites everyone eventually. Some are too scared to go back into his lair afterwards. But not you; you’ve got Cold blood in your veins and that means you’ll freeze him with your steely-eyed stare, and this time, without the glove, and keep the tongs below your waist, boy. Do like I taught you.”

 

            Over the course of the next six years I became a good hand in the shop, learning to forge all manner of hand tools, horse shoes, axe blades, and decorative pieces. I made chains, pot hooks, and corner guards for wagon boxes. I learned to temper metal, and Grampa continued to teach me important lessons about the trade that somehow seemed to relate to life in a much broader sense. Every good thing in me by the time I was an adult came from Amos Cold’s teachings. Now, as I stood paralyzed on the edge of the Arena sands, seeing the broken body of my Grampa atop a heap of corpses, I felt something break open inside me. Hot tears stung my cheeks, but at the same time I felt this unspeakable anguish, another part of my brain was screaming that if I didn’t act, and right now, I’d likely be joining Grampa and the rest on the other side of the great divide.

            The Muse who had pulled the side off the worm box was heading out of the arena. I dashed after him and grabbed up the flat aluminum piece, pulling it and the rope free from him so quickly that I had it before he realized what I was doing. I used the metal side to scoop half of the worms back into the box, taking care to slip the top into the middle of the screaming mass, above the sand. I guessed that there were over a thousand of the flesh-eating buggers, each two to three centimeters long and pale as a severed finger that has been soaking in a jar of preservative for years. Tipping the box ninety degrees so that the open side faced up, I then untied the cord and placed the metal plate back atop the opening.

            Now I could turn my attention to the wagon. Feed the enemies of freedom to the worms. Burn the rest. I looked at Grampa and didn’t see how I could bear to watch his flesh curling into smoke and ash. My right hand ached in the very places where I’d gotten burned as a child. He’d watched my burn without flinching. I suppose he would have saved me if I hadn’t the presence of mind to plunge my hand into the water during that long ago lesson. He was always there for me.

            I lifted his still form over my shoulder and carried him to the center of the ring, placing him face up on the sand. His uniform was torn in a number of places and I could see the bruising of his skin. To my surprise, his body seemed supple and there was a palpable warmth I could feel through the fabric. Hoping against all reason based on his outward appearance, I rested my hand on his chest, feeling for even the faintest heartbeat. It was only after I pressed harder so that I could feel my pulse against the stationary cage of his ribs that I gave up and turned to the remaining bodies.

            Cassandra Caggonar was next. Her flesh was cooler and some of the rigor that accompanies death had set in. I placed her corpse next to Grampa’s. Beneath her, the ruined body of Cypher Hegemon, covered in blood and sand, sprawled diagonally across the wagon. Someone had pulled the knife from his neck, just as it had been in my dream, only his wound seemed smaller and his head was in no danger of coming off. Still, he was covered in blood and his eyes were open, rolling back in his head so that only the white beneath the cornea could be seen. I dragged his corpse out by a leg and threw him to the side of the wagon. Alta Chevron’s corpse, the Sergeant I’d known as Chevy, was curled in a fetal ball. His throat was cut from beyond the base of his left ear to the lobe of the right. A black stain covered everything beneath his shoulders. His corpse was filthy, but as one of the good guys I deposited him beside Grampa on the opposite side of where I’d left Cassie.

            What I saw next gave me a moment’s pause. Had Cassie not been so insistent that I trust Dockrill and Ella I would have stopped right there, perhaps even flinging the whole box of worms at the three watching me from the Arena’s front row. “How did you get these two?” I asked Dockrill, as I looked at the murdered bodies of the two boys Cypher had caught in the shelter in Heresy sector.

            Dockrill shrugged his shoulders.

            “Does it matter? Your task is the same no matter where the bodies come from.”

            “I didn’t kill these boys. Bundy did, Rheynstadt’s bitch.”

            Dockrill gave no more reply, crossing his legs and leaning toward Ella to whisper something. She was looking at the wagon. Her face was flushed and a sheen of sweat glittered on her forehead. I thought it was arousal.

           

            The boys were innocent of any wrong doing I could identify. I doubted they could be friends of the Liberty Keepers, but they’d given no indication of enmity. They were simply two innocent casualties of a conflict that was as unbelievable as it was unfair. I put them with Grampa, laying them out at his head and foot. I’d been thinking about the worms. If they were flesh-eaters, as Bradna had stated, they probably were capable of secreting some extremely harsh chemicals. I’d seen them, and the tiny mouths and small hooked teeth were no match for the cooling flesh of the damned.

            Beneath the boys I found three corpses burned almost beyond recognition. A charred uniform with the still recognizable captain’s insignia and Caduceus let me know that Post, Morrischenko, and Digit’s aide had been somehow borne from the exploded remains of my apartment to the unforgiving dungeon of Dockrill’s madness. I climbed into the wagon bed and kicked their corpses out. I wondered if the worms would eat charred flesh.

            Only one body remained, covered with another tarpaulin. I knew whose corpse awaited disposition and paused to consider how I might handle it: Tiny Hallowell, the only one with the girth to manifest the stinking mound that lay against the front wall of the wagon bed.

            I jumped down and pulled the cart, with a little difficulty, to a spot just beyond where my other friends lay. I hoped to rock it and deposit Tiny on the sand beside Grampa and the rest. Having completed that, I planned to reload the wagon with those to be fed to the worms. It would provide a stable and safe platform for me to upend the box. Once the bodies had been reduced to bones, I’d flip the wagon over, effectively killing the worms and giving me a secure structure to use as the base of my funeral pyre. This was the plan. It was a plan full of x-factors.

            Mentally, I was half-dead. Each time I passed near to Grampa’s body I could barely breathe. The truth that I knew was that I was the most responsible for his death of anyone currently living in the galaxy. Neither Digit nor Rheynstadt had any part in my crimes that led to the interruption of Grampa’s retirement, as he attended my trial every day. The sLOD and Ella Cantor might have had some role in bringing him to Freelife, but I doubted that. I was as certain as I could possibly be that he’d come looking for me. Possibly he had learned of Rheynstadt’s plotting. Possibly he’d committed some awful crime that had forced the Kinkies’ hands, caused them to banish him the same as they had me. More likely, I thought, he’d planned the whole thing as a frame, setting himself up to take responsibility for a crime he’d not committed. Why? So he could come to Freelife. So he could be nearer to me. Perhaps even so he could save me from Rheynstadt’s plans. After all, he and Digit had a history. Who was to say that the militia intelligence officer hadn’t remained in touch with him despite the rules.

            I was beginning to think about matters that shouldn’t concern me. Here and now, that’s all Freelife was about. Here and now.

            “Are you sure you’ll be able to do this, laddie? Standing there like you are it seems like you’re trying to do it with your mind. ‘Nothing is but thinking makes it so,’ is how I think the old Bard put it. Only that’s not true unless you act on what you’re thinking.” Dockrill sounded as if he were trying to bait me, as if he truly had a time deadline and had just realized how close we were to it. He was no longer lounging easily in his seat, but instead leaned forward, his thin arms resting on the metal rail that separated him from the arena sands. I stared him down. He was unhappy about something, perhaps because I’d launched into the task with such fervor. He couldn’t know that ferocious action was how I dealt with strong emotion. Grampa was dead. Dockrill had the body in his possession. Trust Dockrill? How could I? I looked over my shoulder at Cassie’s corpse. How could I trust anyone?

            I turned my back on the onlookers and pressed it into the wagon. Squatting and reaching underneath the bed with my hands, arms extending, feet set firmly in the sand, I pressed up and felt Tiny’s weight shift, and then all at once the wagon had no more weight as the body fell free with a moist plop.

            Without looking at or speaking to Dockrill, who was cheering me on now, making a mockery of the pornographic ceremony he’d roped me into, I pushed the wagon back to the burned and battered corpses of Cypher and the rest. It only took a few minutes to load the wagon. I was ready to set the worms to their feast. I’d picked up the worm box and was walking to the wagon when I heard my name. Only it didn’t come from the seats. It came from the corpses behind me. It was just the barest whisper, but I heard it. My enhanced hearing seemed to be permanent and I heard my name said in a way that I at once knew the identity of the speaker. I dropped the worm box, which tumbled over, spilling the entirety of the population onto the sand, and ran to Grampa’s side where they set to screaming like a rocket bearing right before an engine explosion. I ignored it, thought it meant I’d already failed my test.

            He had one eye open, the cornea blood red and a steady stream of tears running from the corners. The other was swollen completely shut. His breathing, though shallow and punctuated by a wheezing from deep in his chest, was regular. I gripped his wrist and felt a faint, fluttering pulse. He tried to close a hand on my arm but his fingers seemed to not respond to his brain’s command. The clotted blood in his nose forced him to breathe through his mouth and I could see where a half-a-dozen teeth had been cracked or broken near to the jawbone.

            “I don’t suppose you could stand me a drink, boy,” he whispered as the little color he had drained from his face. The corners of his mouth moved, one up, the other down as he tried to smile. It was ugly, but damned if he didn’t still have his sense of humor.

            “I’m dry, Grampa,” I said, blinking back tears of my own.

            He looked at me and nodded, his fingers playing along the hairs of my forearm. He tried to swallow and a ragged cough shook his body, which seemed much smaller, lying broken and barely conscious.

            “Dockrill, is he treating you all right?”

            I glanced over my shoulder where my small audience leaned over the rail. They were silent, struggling perhaps to hear what Grampa was saying. I shook my head and the space between Grampa’s eyebrows furrowed. I had nothing more to say about Dockrill to anyone until I understood what his position was in all of the intrigue that I seemed to be about to drown beneath.

            “Well, did he at least feed you? Man going to the Arena show on an empty stomach won’t last long.”

            Did his voice seem stronger? That hardly seemed possible, still, Amos Cold was a survivor. I would have bet everything I had in the world, which at that moment was exactly nothing, but if I had something, I’d risk it all on his being a corpse as much as any of the others when I offloaded him from the trundle.

            “Grampa, you shouldn’t talk. I’m going to get…going to ask…” What was I getting, who was I asking? Dockrill was probably whetting his knife behind my back, ready to gut me as soon as I turned around. I glanced back over my shoulder and he and Ella had leaned back, seemed to be engaged in a sotto voce conversation. Bradna and Tohoana still gazed intently in my direction. I waved to Tohoana, gesturing for her to come near. I thought she might have some herbal remedy that could help Grampa to hold on for a time while I figured out where to get help for him.

            She gave Dockrill a glance and he shook his head.

            “Tohoana can’t fix this, Garrett,” he said to me. “Your worms are dead. What are you going to do now? The test isn’t over until either you die or you complete the tasks assigned you.”

            I looked at Ella whose expression was as unfathomably vague as ever.

            “You said you tried to get a radio to me, one of the special ones. I’d like that now.”

            “And I’d like an interstellar yacht with a bevy of whores ready to ride me all the way back to the seventy worlds,” came Dockrill’s answer, as Ella remained silent but for her enigmatic smile. “But some things just aren’t possible.”

            Ella leaned over and whispered something to Dockrill who at first looked outraged and then seemed to relax, as if whatever she’d said had taken on a new meaning. Dockrill rose and crossed to me. He had his knife in his hand.

            I resolved to not move. If he was going to fillet me, he could do it right on top of Grampa’s body. I knew that Amos didn’t have much time left without the attention of a medical community that didn’t exist within fifty thousand parsecs of Freelife. I was ready to die. Of course, I saw Cypher’s body behind Dockrill as he came near, saw the gaping hole in the sadistic corpse’s neck and thought I might first take the knife from Dockrill and then give it back to him in the form of a long incision from crotch to chin. He was fast, and the first time he’d attacked me I was still very weak. But whatever was going on inside my blood had turned what should have been a six to twelve week recovery into a near miraculous couple of hours. I felt as strong as when I’d been sentenced to Freelife ten years past. Now, as Dockrill drew near, the only odd thing in terms of my physical nature was a strong and sudden ringing in my right ear, the one Grampa had repaired with his nanotech saturated yellow.

            Dockrill was at my side. He gazed down into Grampa’s battered face.

            “Amos, this boy hasn’t got what it takes. He isn’t the one to lead us.”

            Grampa coughed, and I could feel the spasms in his muscles. He was in agony as he tried to draw a breath to answer the accusation.

            “You haven’t even tested him yet, Dock…” his voice faded away but for the first time he was able to close his hand around my arm. It felt like a hug from a newborn kitten, but at least he was holding on. Stay alive just a little longer, Grampa, I thought.

            “Yeah, hee-hee, you’re right. Of course he hasn’t figured any of that out yet.”

            “He’s a little slow in the figuring department.” Grampa spoke in short, one or two word bursts, panting in between. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto the sand, raising orange and brown bubbles and I thought a faint hissing sound. “I think you ought to try him, anyhow.”

            Dockrill looked at both of us, his gray eyes moving between our two faces as if assessing whether I really were Amos Albert Cold’s grandson.

            “Why’s that, Amos.”

            “Because,” Grampa somehow managed to raise his head, his grip on my arm tightening ever so slightly. “He’s a Cold. The blood in his veins is the same as mine. A little better even. I gave him quite a – a boost when I patched up his ear.”

            Dockrill’s eyebrows went up.

            “And when was that?”

            “Earlier, back in Heresy. Right before Rheynstadt’s boys grabbed us.”

            Dockrill shook his head.                                                                       

            “Never thought I’d see you caught by that one, Amos.”

            Amos’s eye opened a little wider. His nostrils, though clogged with dried blood, flared, and the hand on my arm was a palpable weight now. The tops of his fingers exerted a definite pressure.

            “Who said I got caught?”

            Dockrill looked momentarily frightened and took a step back. It was an action that I would still be puzzling over when he leaned down and grabbed me by the ear, the right one. The ringing stopped all at once.

            “All right, Garrett. Now comes the real test.” He flipped his knife over in his hand and threw it at the ground, burying the blade to the hilt beside me. “Now, boy, you pick up that knife, and you do what needs to be done.”

            “What’s that?” I was lost.

            “Your Grampa here isn’t the sainted father you think he is. It’s no accident that he’s been friends for thirty plus years with Dominicus Akyron. Nor was it Rheynstadt’s ambition that led to the destruction of Freelife Six and the deaths of half the inmates in the system – a tradition that gets played out on a smaller scale every year with the Sixkill holiday. None of these deaths would have happened if Amos Albert Cold hadn’t been so proud when the Judgment came to the system all those years ago.”

            “What’s the Judgment?” I asked.

            Dockrill glanced at Grampa, as if expecting him to fill in the blanks for me, but the old man appeared dead – eyes closed, limbs flaccid, only the slightest rise and fall of his chest showed he was still breathing.

            “That was Rheynstadt’s first ship, the one he commanded thirty years ago. It carried a secret sLOD cargo that vanished, along with most of the crew and the entire population of Freelife Six.”

            “SixKill Day,” I murmured. “The Judgment nuked the planet?”

            Dockrill slapped me on the side of my head. Grampa’s eyes opened briefly at the sound of it.

            “You naïve pup. The Judgment carried the bombs but a man detonated them. The man you see lying in front of you. Amos Albert Cold, he’s the one did in the system. You know why?”

            Garrett shook his head. He couldn’t imagine what would motivate his grandfather to do such a thing. For all his gruff bravado, he was at his core a decent and honorable human being. To trigger two hundred warheads against a defenseless civilian population simply required incentives that didn’t exist in the character of the man Garrett had grown up with.

            “You ain’t figured it out? Well, it weren’t love nor money, I’ll tell you that. Although I suppose some shallower thinker with less understanding of the subtleties of human behavior might have said it was one or the other. He does love you, boy.”

            “He didn’t do it,” Garrett started to protest, kneeling and feeling his hand close on the knife handle. Dockrill glanced down at his empty palm before locking his eyes on Garrett’s.

            “He did, and the proof is here.”

            “There is no proof.” Garrett stood, held the knife overhead against the lights to inspect the edge. Micro-serrations along the hooked cutting side and a crystalline handle of a design he’d never before seen glistened in the yellow-hued light of the arena. The knife wasn’t forged, it was manufactured. Stamped on a press, sharpened on a diamond wheel and the handle sculpted out of living rock, though Garrett couldn’t place the specific mineral used. He studied it for striations or fiber lines. It might have been a synthetic, a composite. When Dockrill leaned toward him he tensed, turning the hooked edge so he could slash down the front of the old man’s body.

            Dockrill didn’t back down, didn’t even blink. His face was blank except for the eyes which sparkled with a ‘go ahead, if you dare,’ quality.

            “You can split me from gizzard to craw if you like. I’ve had more than my share of years of living and I’ve no illusions that such as that will go on forever. I should have died a hundred times already, but I’m still here. And I’m not afraid of you. So what’s it going to be?”

            “What is it you want me to do?”

            Dockrill looked at Garrett as if studying some mutant, retarded life form. His eyes narrowed beneath a brow that furrowed. When he drew back his lips, his teeth shone stained and crooked, and his breath was like the stench that came from the corpses in the space, all combined into an elixir that might flare up in a spontaneous explosion of decay at a word. The old man clicked his tongue and Garrett felt drops of spittle on his cheek. His grip on the knife tightened and he tensed for a spring. Dockrill’s hands were at his sides and Garrett noted that the old man’s fingers trembled.

            “Do what you were born to do. Avenge Freelife Six and free the rest of us. Kill your Grampa, boy. Take that blade and finish what the militia couldn’t. Do that and you’ll have your thousand followers and more. We’ll march on that base and we’ll make a cape for you out of Rheynstadt’s flayed skin and a footstool out of old Digit’s bones.”

            “Grampa didn’t destroy a planet of innocent people.”

            There was a sound, a faint whimper that rose from the battered body of Amos Cole.

            “Grampa?” Garrett, ignoring everything and everyone else, dropped to his knees in the sand. Amos seemed to be having a mild seizure. Foamy saliva lined his lips and his body trembled. He was moving his tongue, but his eyes were closed. Garrett cradled the aged head in his lap, setting the knife aside. “What is it Grampa?”

            The old man’s opened his bloodshot eye. He moved it for a moment, until it came still on Garrett’s face.

            He was wheezing, taking shallow fast breaths that got progressively deeper and longer with less of an exhalation each time. His chest seemed to swell slightly with each repetition. At last he spoke, exhaling all his air in a long declaration that Garrett could just barely hear.

            “I killed them, all right, boy. The sLOD sent me there to do it and I did. I did it and you got to live because of that. Now the only way for you to find out the rest is to do what Dockrill asks. You kill me and he’ll take you to Rheynstadt and from there you can learn the big secret about this whole place, the one that the sLOD don’t want anyone to know.”

            “Secret?” It was all Garrett could say over the lump that had formed in his throat.

            “Aye. Secret.”

            “You tell me.”

            Grampa shook his head.

            “Can’t.” He coughed and a gush of blood came from his mouth. “Can’t tell what you don’t know.”

            Dockrill was beside Garrett, pressing the knife into his hand.

            “He’s going to die, boy. But that isn’t how this works. You have to kill him. If he dies before you slash his throat then no one will follow you. We’ll turn you over to Rheynstadt and you won’t like what happens next.”

            If Grampa died, Garrett didn’t care what happened. They could all die together. Without Amos Albert Cold, the universe could cease to exist. What he didn’t know was that the universe felt much the same way.

            “Garrett,” Grampa called, his voice weak as newborn kitten, “You don’t think I could do what Dockrill says I done. But you don’t know the sLOD, not at all. And you don’t yet know that there are things worth dying for, and things worth killing for. Even killing thousands.”

            Garrett couldn’t help but look away, toward the arena stands where Ella Cantor was now standing, her face flushed, the essence of her charms emanating in waves across the tortured sand to fill Garrett’s head. The sound of blood rushing in his ears was followed by a blurring of his vision. He felt the cold stone of the knife in his hand, heard Dockrill’s voice, though he couldn’t make out what he was saying.

            “Do  it,” a voice said. He had no idea whether it was from within or without. The knife flashed overhead as his arm moved. He heard a scream and a sound like a rocket launching. His arm went up again and he saw the knife dripping crimson. He was still looking at Ella who held him with her eyes. His arm moved again and in that moment the roof of the arena shattered and all below were buried beneath rubble and ruin.