Life Sentence
By
J. M. R. Gaines
Text copyright @ 2016 John Manley Roberts Gaines
To Jo, the Entara of this Earth
Chapter One
The judge wriggled uncomfortably in his robes as he read the scrap of paper, then passed it back to the bailiff and said, “Foreman of the jury, in the case of the state against Wilhelm Klein for first degree murder of Feldwebel Schmidt, Kommissar Lebov, and Inspector Ciccolini, how find you the defendant?
“Guilty!”
“Defendant, have you anything to say before sentence is pronounced?”
“I was framed,” answered Klein in a deadpan delivery.
“Mr. Klein, really! We have satellite photos of 1 to 35 resolution showing you pulling the trigger on two of the three auxiliary security personnel who periodically served as contractors to the government. If you hadn’t decided to murder the third one in a lavatory, we’d have a photo of that, too. In that, DNA proves your presence. It’s true all three were off duty, but their contracts afford them the same protection as full-time servants of the state. How can you possibly say with a straight face that you were framed?”
“What can I say? Do you always trust a camera a hundred miles up in the sky? You asked me if I had anything to say, and I say I was framed.”
“Since there are no mitigating circumstances, I shall pass directly on to sentencing,” said the judge, smoothing his moustache and ignoring the argumentative prisoner. “The court of the United Nations, District 12, Circuit C, Region 35, sitting in the city of Athens has found you guilty of murder. This is a capital crime and calls in principle for the death penalty.”
Suddenly the walls of the courtroom erupted with protestors waving signs and chanting “Save a life! Save a life!” and “No more Justice with bloody hands!” The contrast between the projected images and the relative tranquility of the little court chambers was acute. Inside the room sat only the judge, the bailiff, and the robotically restrained prisoner. Even the foreman of the jury was only holographic, attending the trial from his home hundreds of miles away. But the streets around the Palace of Justice were filled with angry activists.
“This is Kent Phillips reporting from Athens where yet another death penalty has set off demonstrations around the Acropolis in protest to capital punishment. As might be expected, the majority of the protestors are Greeks and Turks who have been here all week for this session of the assizes. But there is also a sprinkling of Brits, Poles, Germans, and French, since this batch of hearings includes an overflow from the courts all over Circuit C. Our psychometric reaction scale shows a reading of 67, which makes this one of the livelier responses of the week and may portend the outbreak of some minor looting and the torching of automobiles in the nearby neighborhoods. Now over to our analyst Demetrios Palamenides!” The screens shifted from the blond, Californian traits of the announcer in the streets to the darker, more elegant face of a man clad in a designer suit.
“Kent, we see this as a very controversial verdict. Before we cut away to commercials, I can tell you that our viewer audience rates confidence in the judge at only 22.7%, lowest of the past three weeks. And now a word from Müllerwurst, the fine old-world sausage founded in 2075.” Dancers in lederhosen filled the screens, weaving their way through the happy chaos of Oktoberfest, while in a little corner window, the producer counted down to cue in the magistrate.
Judge Brock whispered “Shit!” away from the microphone and then turned back to his most dignified courtroom manner. “As I was saying, the death penalty is mandatory IN PRINCIPLE in these cases, but I am willing to indulge the public abhorrence for further violence and commute the prisoner’s sentence to life if any authorized body will claim him for a prisoner. Is any authorized agent in the audience willing to make a clemency bid?” There was suspense on the view screens and the digital display of Judge Brock’s approval rating shot up 10% on the courtroom master console. The public loved this moment almost as much as the crowds in the Coliseum must have loved waiting to see what the emperor’s thumb would do. But none of the incoming data sources lit up. The bailiff, who was off camera and off audio, sneered in Klein’s face and said, “Nobody wants to take a chance on a con with your rap sheet!” Watching the approval points erode from his digital display, Judge Brock suddenly added, “Since we are too close to dinnertime to evaluate all the offers coming into our studios, I have to say tune in tomorrow to find out the results of this sentencing, followed by the fantastic details of the LoBello rape case. This is John Gabriel Brock saying that’s all for this issue of Criminal Court Drama!”
Klein slouched against the wall of his cell. He would not turn on the view screens, and he was tired of reading. He set his antique first edition of As I Lay Dying on the table next to the bunk. He had stolen it from a merchant in Colonial Williamsburg several years ago and never had a chance to really get into it before he was incarcerated. Rossellini the trustee rolled up the prison library cart outside the bars. “That’s pretty depressing crap to be reading in your cell,” he remarked. “How about this to cheer you up? Two Tibetan girls and an orangutan?” He held up one of the generic black holodisks that were loaded with prison porno.
“Unlike you, I don’t fancy sex with animals.”
“Huh, you’ll be lucky to get an animal where you are going” pouted Rossellini. “You’ll be happy to get an orangutan. Or even a mangy monkey!”
“What do you mean where I’m going?” Klein knew that the trustees were often privy to all sorts of news that the cons could not normally get.
“I mean you have been claimed!”
“No shit! Where?” Klein’s mind raced. Maybe one of the platforms in the Arctic or Antarctic. He could face that. They said Kerguelen Island wasn’t so bad if you had warm clothes. Even the moon. That would take some adjustment, but he could take the moon. Just no asteroid duty. An endless spinning of stars in the black void would get to him in a matter of weeks. Anything but asteroid duty.
“Domremy”
“What?”
“I said Domremy. You are about to become a proud citizen of the colony of Domremy.”
“Where the hell is that?”
Rosellini started to chuckle. “Wellll, they say you tie your ass to an ion accelerator, take a deep breath, fly out to Way, Way the Hell Out There, then turn left and go as far as you can till you run out of fuel!”
“Funny man. I’m going to recommend you for a merit badge in geography.”
“No kidding Klein,” said the trustee, turning serious for a minute, “You have any final desires, you better try to hook up now. They gonna ice you down for a good many months to send you out to Domremy. I know because I seen the requisitions for the suit. You’re facing one hell of a long nap, man.”
“Nuts,” said Klein, looking at the floor. “In that case, give me the damn holodisk.”
It was worse than Rossellini had predicted. The next day they put him on the Jet-Cat for the trip across to Alexandria. Klein had hoped they would launch him up to the platforms from Woomera so that he could experience the exhilaration of lifting off from Earth. But it was not to be. They were treating him strictly as cargo. He would be iced down on Earth and launched in a container with a hundred other stiffs from the big mass driver that Olivetti had just built in the desert down near Mogadishu, almost exactly on the Equator for minimum orbital thrust. He would have liked to look out on the Mediterranean whisking by at 80 knots, but he was to be locked in a windowless biologicals hold with an armed robotic guard and case after case of the latest Ebola serum. He shuffled down the gangplank at Alexandria, right onto a bus for Port Sai
d. There, in a ratty little lab, they handed him over to a pair of sadistic technicians who didn’t give him enough tranquilizer to put him to sleep. They laughed and laughed as his panic grew. Few people who have not been iced can imagine the feelings that go through you as your body systems shut down one by one and paralysis creeps up from your toes to your head in an almost discernible line until it reaches the face. The mouth shuts down first, as you gag on your last attempts to articulate a word, any word, before you can speak no longer, then your nose, as you frantically dilate, gulping for a last breath of air, then, last of all, the organs of sight, slowly numbing and dying while you strain until it feels like your eyeballs are going to pop out of your head as you grasp at the last few twinkles of light.
He became vaguely conscious of still being alive when he was somewhere out in space, cramped onto a shelf in a transport compartment, still in his shipping suit. After a while he began to panic again, as it seemed that he would soon exhaust whatever air was slowly pumped into the suit, asphyxiating before he could move his arms and legs. Shouting did no good, but just as he thought he would go mad, a crew member came into the room, turned on the light, and nonchalantly went down the shelf unzipping suits, quickly passing by Klein to finish the row. The man had already opened the hatch to head for other chores when Klein was able go croak out, “Is this, is this Domremy?”
“Where?” said the puzzled mate. “I got no idea where you carcasses are going, but this is the spaceport at Tau Ceti. You’ll be reprocessed and sent out again from here.”
Klein felt a wave of nausea sweep over him as he realized he would have to go through the icing process all over again, maybe more than once, before he got to wherever Domremy was. He must have fainted after that.
There were gentle hands, wiping his face with a wet cloth. “If I’m dead, they must have sent me to the wrong place,” Klein thought to himself. The face of the woman bending over him was not exactly angelic, but Klein could have believed it. As he strained to talk, the woman hushed him. “You must keep quiet, Herr Klein. Your vocal chords are damaged. You must have scr… It must have been a most difficult trip.”
His eyes drifted to her nametag. Helga Pedersen. “I see you want to know who I am. No, I am not German, but a Dane. But we have a lot in common. I was commuted to Tau Ceti fifteen years ago. Yes, I was just a girl, but old enough to be tried as an adult. No matter what for. Don’t ask, don’t tell, as the Americans say.”
Klein’s face settled into a calm expression as Helga continued to clean him up. He could feel pins and needles in his hands and knew that meant he soon would be able to move them. In fact, he could twitch them a little already. Helga noticed his efforts. “Yes, your neurologicals seem good and you should have full body functions. Reproductives they will know about later. You know that you were shot out through the Van Allen Belts in a freight container, so nothing is guaranteed. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason why you can’t assume your new job out on Domremy.”
Klein tried to form a question mark with his face. He must have succeeded. “What is your job? I’m afraid I can’t discuss that with you. Obviously, it has nothing to do with family life, or they wouldn’t have shipped you out like a sack of potatoes. All I can tell you is that you need all the sleep you can get, because your new life will be very, very tough. So take advantage and rest now.”
Even after he could speak and move again, there was little more information that he could obtain from Helga, or from the sad-faced physician who eventually pronounced him fit. He got two weeks of workouts in the gym with lots of time off for reading and what seemed like surprisingly good food. No wonder -- Tau Ceti’s planets were beautiful places, like Earth without the plagues and pollution. He never got to see them, except in holotours. At the end of the fortnight the sad doctor very gently anaesthetized him and started the re-icing process. Whatever he gave him, it kept away the nightmares that had plagued him on the stage out from Earth.
His second reawakening was quite different. The crew of the freighter Nahant was a ribald collection of space sailors who favored old-fashioned heavy metal music from the twentieth century and toasted their revived “passengers” with ice-cold vodka. A simple pledge to obey ship’s rules was enough for them, though they warned Klein that, at the first infraction he might be clamped in irons or even flushed out the garbage port. They knew precious little of what went on surface-side on Domremy, but seemed to have an electronic acquaintance with most of the inhabitants. They assured Klein that he would certainly be attached to the militia under the command of one Marshall Stafford and that he would see plenty of fighting against Local species. Every man they dropped off on Domremy was a top-quality fighting man, they assured him, except for a bunch of stupid pacifist farmers, but the crew all disputed among each other what the possible chores for a triple cop-killer would be like. So it was that several days later they came in view of a blotchy orange-colored planet, gave him a final toast, and shuttled him down in a lighter to surface coordinates called in by the gruff voice of Marshall Stafford. Klein was the only passenger to debark at Domremy, the others all going on to the next colony at Dahlgren. That didn’t make him feel any better.
As he squinted into the powerful, pervasive light of Domremy’s binary suns, Klein heard someone call his name. In front of him gradually emerged the shape of a tall, wizened man dressed in loose white robes and a flowing silver cape and broad-rimmed silver hat. A 6-round Kikkonnen multi-rocket launcher was propped on the side of his saddle. He was astride an animal Klein had never seen before, but which looked like a cross between a horse and an alpaca, with the curly fleece, short limbs and erect ears of the latter, but the mane and tail of the former.
“I’m Willie Klein. You must be Marshall Stafford.”
“Best if you just call me Marshall. You ready to be sworn in?”
“Guess so.”
“Raise your right hand.” It was raised. “You swear to uphold the laws of Domremy Colony and to make no exceptions to any orders given you by a colonist?”
“I do.”
“Got any money?” barked another man urgently, as he loaded boxes onto a mechanical rover.
“What?”
“Money, money! You got any on you? Not that spacescript shit but real dollars?”
“Sorry, pal,” answered Klein with a shrug of his shoulders, as the fellow turned grimly back to his work.
The Marshall rode a few steps closer to Klein. “Amos has a sister on Dahlgren and he’s trying to buy her fare back here. We’re all pitching in, because there are damn few Earth women on this planet, as you’ll learn soon enough. Here, better take this.” The Marshall reached back to pull a long bundle from his saddlebag and passed it to the new recruit. Klein unwrapped it to find an M221 sniper’s rifle with scope, well-oiled and beautifully maintained. “You’re familiar with the weapon.” It was more a statement than a question.
“Trained on one in the Marines.”
“So I noticed on your rap sheet. That was one of the reasons we claimed you. You feel comfortable sitting a thallop, we brought one for you. Otherwise you can ride in the wagon with Amos and the boys.” He hadn’t even noticed that the lighter had almost noiselessly ascended back into the atmosphere and was now no more than a baseball-sized shape in the sky. The wagon looked very crowded.
“I suppose I’ll see what it’s like to ride.”
The thallop’s gait took some getting used to. It was stiff-legged, somewhere between a Tennessee Walker and a trotting horse. He noticed that its ears nervously scanned and twitched to various points of the horizon, like antennae. It must have something to do with these Locals the sailors had mentioned. Everyone in the detachment was armed as though they expected some kind of violence. “How come I have this instead of a Kikkonnen like you’ve got? You afraid I’d shoot a few of you and make a break for it?”
The Marshall spat on the ground and said, “What would be the point of that? You got your own ship to take you back to Tau Ceti?”<
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“I don’t know, these prairies don’t look too inhospitable. A man could do pretty well out here on his own.”
“A man could get pretty dead out here on his own, only not fast enough!”
That puzzling remark made Klein ponder a bit. “You still haven’t explained why everybody but me has a weapon that can flatten a few tanks, while mine will only fire old-fashioned bullets.”
“It only makes sense, since our target’s so much different from yours. What did they tell you up there, anyway? Or not tell you?”
“They told me almost nothing.”
“Damn, damn, damn them administrators! They didn’t tell you you were coming here to be a mankiller?”
“A mankiller? What man do you need killed? And why can’t you do it yourselves?”
“We need you to kill any one of us, if necessary, and we can’t do it ourselves because if you get ready to shoot us, we’re already worse than doomed.”
That is when Klein learned about the Locals and about why a copkiller from Bremen was claimed by a farming colony billions of miles away from Earth. The Marshall explained that every man in a detachment was armed with Kikkonnens except the mankiller. Kikkonnens were the only weapon effective when a Local weighing about 500 pounds came bounding two or three hundred yards through the air to snatch a host. One round from a Kikkonnen would blow it to pieces, or at least shred it so badly with shrapnel that it would fall short of its target and be dispatched by a grenade or laser handgun. Locals most often attacked alone, although they had been known to gather at times in small groups. Coming in through the air at eighty-five miles an hour, they were a pretty frightening adversary. They landed with pin-point accuracy and needed only a couple of seconds to fasten a human being to their underside with several pairs of claws sharp as steel, then, with one bound, they were almost out of range again. The adults were strictly vegetarians and didn’t finish off the host. Instead, they stabbed through the spinal column with their ovipositor and laid four sausage-sized eggs in the host’s innards, then buried it up to the head in the soft sand. Those sausages were hungry little devils, but often the host was still alive – for a little while – when they emerged a week later. The mankiller had only a few seconds to sight up when it looked like a man might be seized, and at best could get off only two or three shots. With an effective range of almost 2 miles, the M221 was best suited to dispatching any host before the Local got out of range.
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 1
