Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Read online

  “As you can see, the area around the former Site 35, now named ‘Stafford Station’ by the colonists, currently appears to be mostly secure. Attacks by the ‘Locals’ are down roughly 88.7 percent. Based on this, I recommend appointing a new marshall and moving the experienced defense forces to new sites further into the frontier,” said Hollingsworth.

  “Which candidate do you propose appointing to the position of Marshall? He’ll have big shoes to fill in replacing Stafford. According to the polling data we obtained, he had the highest approval ratings of any marshall on Domremy, and his team was one of the most efficient in terms of Local eradication in their area…”

  “And because of that, we have more flexibility in terms of who we can choose for the next marshall of Stafford Station. I’m going to have Sam Geller appointed marshall of Stafford Station and send that man killer -- what’s his name, Klein? -- out to one of the more troublesome sites. Which would you recommend?”

  Duquesne sighed. “I don’t think we should begin the transition this early, and Sam Geller’s testing scores for marksmanship, leadership capacity, and organizational capabilities are all among the lowest of the possible marshall candidates. Maybe we can throw a bone to the colonists there by allowing an election. They always love the illusion of self-determination. But if we must transition the old marshall’s team out ASAP, I’d recommend sending Klein to Site 89. Lots of reported Local attacks, high mortality rates, a minimum of competent staff…if any site needs an effective mankiller, it’s Site 89. But I strongly recommend a different candidate for the Stafford Station marshall, like Steven…”

  “Site 89 sounds like an excellent choice,” said Hollingsworth. “Get the paperwork filed so we can have him shipped out there and transitioned to the new site. As for Geller, I think he’ll suffice for Stafford Station—that site is calm enough that we don’t need to waste our stronger candidates there. Be sure to send all the necessary reports for Domremy to the Board of Visitors—they’ll be very pleased to see the progress in the Domremy colonization project. I’m going to lunch now…try to get those flowcharts measuring Site 89’s mortality rates on my desk by the time I’m back this afternoon.” Then Hollingsworth left Duquesne alone in her office to wrestle with the problems of mortality flowcharts and incompetent marshalls.

  Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who does any work for this company, Duquesne thought as she filled in the stats on Site 89 as she prepared the flowchart. As she took a cursory glance at Klein’s personal files, she corrected herself. Although I know that’s a lie.

  Chapter Two

  It feels naked to be a mankiller without a gun, Klein thought as he sat in the cramped train seat as he awaited his arrival in Site 89. After Jim Stafford’s death and his unceremonious departure from Stafford Station -- hustled out the door with a “good riddance!” from Stafford’s replacement and an order to relinquish his M221 before leaving on the train -- he felt like he had left behind everything he could possibly trust on Domremy. Peebo had given him his contact for emergencies, and…

  “Does Earth truly look like it does in these…’shows’, Klein? It looks so wonderful, with great trees, and castles, and wild lands, and…”

  And I guess there’s Ragatti here, if I’m really desperate, Klein reasoned. “I don’t think your favorite drama, Heroes of Jamestown, was ever an accurate guide to life on Earth. Historians have pretty much disproven the hypothesis that the Jamestown colonists were wiped out by Indian shamans who could summon zombies,” Klein said with a cynical snicker.

  “But surely it looks at least something like this, Klein. Mountains, lakes, forests…it would be so much better to live there than this dreary, endless plain of wind and dust. Do people still visit the old places like Jamestown?”

  “Oh, you can still visit Jamestown…if you have enough money to pay for the submarine ride to go there. Rich folks tell me it’s quite beautiful. A lot of those places you enjoyed watching on those TV shows are under water now…all of New Orleans, most of New York except the Floating Theatre of Broadway, what used to be the gambling area of Macau, and even the District of Columbia, the old capitol of the United States. Most of the low-lying and coastal areas of Earth got flooded around the beginning of the 22nd Century.”

  “How could the Earth have changed so rapidly?” Ragatti asked. “The Forlani History Keepers, the xartivash, say that nothing has changed in our weather and land for the equivalent of thousands of Earth years. What happened to Earth?”

  Klein sighed. “This train we’re riding on runs only on electric power. Most Earth transportation now is either electric powered or natural gas --eventually it’ll all be electric. But before then, up to the end of the 21st Century, we used mainly petrol-based fuel. It made the Earth’s climate much warmer, and the seas rose, flooding the continental coasts and low-lying islands. Huge areas that had been covered in deep ice melted. We used petrol because it was cheap, and we stopped using it too late to save many of our coastal cities. Much of Earth’s farmland became too arid and dry for agriculture, and that’s one reason why we’re here to colonize.”

  “Well, why are you here? Peebo and his religious friends are farmers, all right, but what about you?” Ragatti said with an inquisitive flash in her eyes.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Will you ever tell me?”

  “Probably not.”

  As Ragatti turned away with a crestfallen look on her face, Klein looked out the window and watched the endless waves of bluish green Domremy grass pass by. It was soothing, like watching the waves of Earth’s oceans. Klein put on some headphones to blot out the sound of the inane Earth shows Ragatti was watching on the overhead monitors. He listened to slow instrumental music and watched the rolling waves of grass until, in spite of the bumpy train track and the horribly cramped seat that crushed his knees into his chest, he fell asleep.

  He awoke to the sound of the announcer’s harsh, scratchy voice. “Last stop, Site 89, everybody out!” As Klein walked out of the train with Ragatti, they saw a group of heavily armed men standing underneath the train stop shelter. In the center of the group was a man in early middle age with straw colored hair and sunken eyes. “Welcome to Site 89, mankiller,” the man said. “My name’s Cashman. Yours?”

  “I’m Klein, former mankiller from Stafford Station.”

  “We got your reports from over there. Seems like you have a damn fine record of doing your job. That record of yours better stay top notch, because we don’t care much for mankillers around here otherwise,” Cashman said. The men surrounding him stared at Klein, looking for signs of weakness and incompetence in their new mankiller, any excuse to be rid of the untrustworthy outsider.

  Klein defused the situation the only way he knew how. “I can’t be a mankiller without a gun. Where’s mine?”

  “You’ll find some stock M221’s in the armory. Only the best for our man killers. A good gun is the only perk they’ll get here. Tarkington will escort you to the armory, and you can pick the one you want there.” Tarkington, a tall, muscular man with a shaved head, stepped forward, prepared to guide Klein to the armory. Klein nodded at him.

  “One question,” Klein asked Cashman. “Housing. At Stafford Station I lived at a farmer’s place. Where’s the mankiller supposed to live here?”

  The crowd of men snickered at Klein’s question. After an awkward pause, Cashman said, “You’ll sleep in the room above the bar, because nobody in this town’ll take a damn mankiller into their home after what our last mankiller did! Billy Frederiksen, aka ‘Billy Sin.’ Couldn’t quite stop his murderous ways here on Domremy, even with all those people he got to shoot as part of his job! Killed the man he was lodging with. Once we heard about that, we formed a posse, shot him dead, sent out the order for a new mankiller, and got you. This is a law and order town, and I intend to keep it that way.”

  And Klein began his service as the mankiller of Site 89. Some things were familiar – the precise aim and range
of an M221, the ominous droning noises of the Locals, and riding into the wilderness on thallops at the crack of dawn and the dim twilight. His housing, however, was nothing like Peebo’s farm. The room above the bar was cramped, poorly ventilated, and most of all noisy. Every single drunken profanity, slurred greeting, and drinking song wafted its way up to torment Klein as he struggled to sleep, especially on the dreaded “Wild Fridays” where the bar would serve drinks until 2AM. Klein was sorely tempted to live with Ragatti in Site 89’s communal Forlani housing until she explained that the rooms in the housing were just as small, and the Forlani as noisy as the barflies below him. So he abandoned that plan and took to taking a Somega pill each night to knock himself out and sleep as smoothly as possible.

  Klein tried to distract himself once a day by sending a message in code to Peebo. Before he had left Stafford Station, his landlord had seemed intent to give him a quick education in the ways of the pacifist farmers, on the pretext that there were many more of them on the outskirts of Site 89 and that they could give Klein a hand if the rest of the residents were as stand-offish as their reputation indicated. Peebo had explained that he belonged to a closely organized group that outsiders usually called the Religious Dissenters, but who usually referred to themselves as The Circle. They had undergone various types of harassment and persecution on Earth because of their refusal to participate in corporate agriculture and had taken refuge first in rural countries away from the corporate centers and eventually on the colony planets. The corporations with planetary patents were eager for anyone who could grow anything out-of-system and they felt that the dissenters’ odd ways and views would simply wither and disappear eventually in the wave of colonial prosperity. All the more so because they had to leave their beloved wives and children behind. Their strong traditional ideas about reproduction, in an age when more and more “civilized” women were using non-coital procedures if they chose to have children at all, were checked by the biological dangers of space travel and planetary settlement. The WEF had already pronounced the dissenters doomed at their latest Davos meeting and instructed the UN government to behave accordingly.

  But according to Peebo, the Dissenters considered space as a salvation rather than an extinction. Confident that they could overcome the medical problems of extraterrestrial breeding, they communicated secretly with each other all over the colonial planets, and even beyond into some alien systems that had accepted them, through a code they called Crop Talk. It seemed to an outsider like a lot of boring farm jargon. To a sophisticate, all farmers ever discussed was the crops and the weather. And that was exactly what Crop Talk consisted of, but with its own phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as body language. Besides basic Low English, it included a lot of foreign elements the dissenters had picked up during their diaspora from the First World. Spanish, Creole, Gujarati, and South Vietnamese bits went side by side with more familiar expressions. Vegetables, farm procedures, agro-marketing, and animal husbandry could be made to express all sorts of things. But Peebo had limited Klein’s instruction so far to a variety of messages involving danger, communication, and matters of health. Without any immediate danger, Klein’s messages for the time being confined themselves to dull statements about his physical well-being and closed with the Crop Talk equivalent of “Write again soon.”

  The townspeople of Site 89 were a different breed than those of Stafford Station. He could rarely get any of them to say more than a few words to him, and even months later, they still looked at him like a leper. In Stafford Station, men hated a mankiller because he might take one of their loved ones, but in Site 89, hating a mankiller was the closest thing they had to an official sport. People even seemed to make a show of it, going on about how horrible it was for a great man like Cashman to have to rely on scum like Billy Sin and “that new mankiller I can’t remember.” Only Tarkington slowly began to talk more openly with him, and even his conversations tended to rely on some alcohol to loosen his tongue. One of the few sources of amusement to Klein was that there seemed to be relatively few brawls in the barroom; Klein reckoned that this wasn’t so much because Site 89 was “a law and order town” as Cashman claimed, but because people were scared shitless that a sociopathic mankiller would put a bullet in them at the first sign of conflict. At least the owner of the bar thinks I’m worth something, Klein often thought as he enjoyed a discounted beer on those long nights.

  Klein made sure not to drink so many discounted beers that it would interfere with his romping with Ragatti almost every night. He had to admit that Entara had chosen him a new girlfriend who offered enough physical excitement for any man and who was extremely well skilled, if a bit too “technical” perhaps, at the maneuvers of sex. She reminded him a bit of a Romanian figure skater years ago who whirled across the ice with stunning expertise, but never seemed to share the emotional thrill she gave to her fans in the arena.

  One night after a notably lusty interlude, he was about to fall asleep when he noticed that, unlike Entara, Ragatti made a sort of regular noise as she slept, a sort of light buzzing. He must have laughed a little too loudly, because she woke up with a start. “What’s wrong? Are you unhappy with me? Is there any danger?”

  “None of the above, Ragatti. I just realized that you snore.”

  “Snore? What is that?”

  “Well, I can’t demonstrate because if I tried it, it would make a noise that doesn’t resemble you at all. You just make a pleasant little noise as you breathe in your sleep.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, sitting up. “I suppose Entara didn’t do that. Well, she was raised with privilege. I am just a very ordinary girl. I’ve made my way the best I could.”

  “Of course you have,” Klein assured her. “Ragatti, you are a very expert and wise companion. So indulge me and tell me how boinking with me compares to your experiences with males of your own kind.”

  “How in the cosmos would I know? I’ve never mated. I’m still ehpliah, a pre-mater.”

  “Does that mean you consider yourself a virgin?” Klein said with a chuckle.

  “Absolutely. Klein, for a partner whom Entara has bragged about and who is now a legend in every Forlani house of pleasure, you are sometimes astonishingly dumb. Don’t they teach you anything about biology on Earth? We have to study twenty or thirty major types of partners in our training.”

  “You can help me now. I gathered from Entara that you do not consider boinking to be the equivalent of mating, but why not? Don’t Forlani males settle down with their females at night just as we do?”

  “You must be joking! Once they shake out of their post-coital stupor, they’re usually scared by all the blood and rush off to cleanse themselves!”

  ”Blood!”

  “Klein, pay attention now. The organ of the Forlani male is nothing like yours, it’s sharp, long and jagged and it pierces right into our tissue and can sometimes even damage organs. The plieh, the mated partner, almost always loses liters of blood and requires immediate attention from a team of sister attendants after the mating. Sometimes it takes many, many days to recover, while she is fed special juices that keep her alive. Meanwhile, her body changes. We change so much after mating. If we are fortunate enough to mate and survive, the fertilized cells in our bodies change our whole chemistry forever.”

  “My god!” Klein exclaimed. “Why would you consent to go through that? It sounds like torture.”

  “In a way it is, but without mating, there can be no birth. And birth… I’m not even going to try to describe it. Our own males don’t begin to grasp it and I doubt you can, even if you try. It is the ecstasy. It is what every one of the Forlani yearns for.”

  Klein could hear the staccato clack clack clack of the drenching summer rain on the roof as he sat on his flimsy bed at night. His supply of Somega had run out and he had forgotten to go to the drugstore to get some more, leaving him trapped between the din of the bar below and the hammering of the rain above. His nonsleeping stupor was interrupted by a loud
banging on the door, and he stumbled over to answer it. As he opened the door, he saw a bleary-eyed Tarkington waiting for him. “Mission time. Boss found a whole bunch of Locals standing in one place for a long time on the radar. We don’t know what they’re doing, but he says it’s a good opportunity to take ‘em out before they move.”

  “Locals at 3AM? Seems strange…they usually don’t show up after 11. Are they sure the thunderstorm isn’t making the scanners malfunction again?”

  “Too many heat signatures for another malfunction. Boots and saddles, we gotta go.”

  Klein cursed under his breath and lumbered out of his room down to the thallop stables. He noticed that the thallops were excited, bleating and snorting, their usually stoic demeanor transformed by the storm. Rain was not a common occurrence on Domremy and the thallops had evolved to survive for long periods on little water, but Klein was still surprised at the dramatic emotional change it brought in them. At least someone out here is enjoying this, Klein thought as he rode with the rest of Cashman’s crew to the area where the Locals were congregating. The farther the seven-man crew rode from town, the taller the native Domremy grasses grew, until the prairie reached its maximum height of about seven feet. The colonists’ defense forces generally didn’t venture this far from town, as the tall grasses obscured their vision and made it harder to get an accurate shot on the Locals. Most of the men in the crew were nervous; only Cashman kept his icy focus, undisturbed and calm in the unfamiliar environment.