See Ya, Space Cowboy

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Goosebumps rendered Genthry’s skin rough enough to sand wood. It was summer on Kindara, but that didn’t mean it was warm. It meant the air was cool and damp, instead of dry and frozen. Residents—humans—might limit themselves to two or three layers instead of four or more. Slaves got one, if any, regardless of their origins or body type.

Condemned prisoners got nothing. Why spend the money? It wasn’t like Genthry had a lot of shame left anyway.

He propped his back up against the moist stone wall and stared out the narrow window. A rosy line on the horizon hinted at the dawn of a new day. As much as Genthry hated to admit it, the colors looked sharper than they had any other time. They were brighter, too. At least whatever powers looked over dying men made sure he would go out with something nice to look at. Sunny days were rare enough on this rock.

He took a deep breath and reflected. His life hadn’t been long, as lives went. It had still been longer than he had any right to expect, especially once he killed the man pretending to own him. He’d been born a slave, and no man would claim ownership of him when his flesh was rendered to ash. He had, by his own actions and choices, freed scores of his fellow enslaved people. He’d helped to free hundreds more. When he was born, fate consigned him to an early death as some wealthy human’s plaything or possibly in a mine somewhere. Genthry had told fate where to stick it and carved his own path. He would still die young, but he would end them as a hero.

Okay, maybe he wouldn’t go down as a hero to the Republic. It was their judges who’d passed the death sentence on him, their laws that allowed his mother to be kidnapped and sold into slavery, and their machinery that would take his life in only a few short minutes. Still, Genthry knew millions whispered his name among themselves even now, associating him with freedom. His body would die, but his name was immortal.

It wasn’t exactly a consolation, but he’d take what he could get at this point.

He stretched as best the tiny space would allow. He’d watched as other condemned men struggled on their way to the scaffold. He sympathized. Here between himself and the walls, he could admit to a certain tremor in the middle of his stomach. He didn’t want to give his guards and killers the satisfaction of seeing his fear. If death was inevitable, he wanted to chill them with his sangfroid. And if an opportunity to escape presented itself, he wanted to have the energy to seize it. He didn’t have much hope on that score, but stranger things had happened. He hadn’t lasted as long as he had without being prepared.

His cell door slid open with a creak, the scent of rust making him recoil a little. One of the few good things about being scheduled to die so soon was that he would never have to see this cursed planet again. Everything decayed here, even the jail cells.

“Genthry?” The lead guard sounded bored. He probably was. They executed something like four men a day in this dump. The guards didn’t care about their crimes, or about their causes. They just wanted to do their jobs and go home. The Republic didn’t pay them much. Genthry had overheard this one talking. He had a second job serving meals to enslaved miners, for crying out loud. He was probably exhausted. “You’re up first today.”

Genthry presented his wrists for binding. The restraints they slapped onto his wrists were different than the ones they normally used, and that only made sense. The lead content in the standard-issue manacles would be too high for the execution to be efficient. They didn’t care about the pain caused to the condemned, but they had a schedule to keep to and they needed to keep things moving.

He wondered idly if these manacles would be any easier to break than the others.

“You going to fight us, Genthry?” the leader asked with a yawn.

“Nope.” Genthry ground his teeth together. “Let’s get it over with.”

“In a rush, are you?” Another guard snorted. “That’s a new one on me.”

“Is fighting going to do me any good?”

“No.”

“Then why bother?” He shrugged as best he could. “This prison isn’t so pretty I want to keep looking at it.”

“Yeah, but it’s the last thing you’re going to see.”

“But I’ll be dead. I won’t care.” The finality of that statement made Genthry’s stomach twist, but he kept his back straight and his head high.

“You heard the man. Let’s do it.” The lead guard stepped out into the hall and called out. “Dead man walking!”

The other prisoners, roused by the guard’s cry, pounded on their doors. It was the only sound in the place as the execution party made their way down the narrow corridor toward the prison yard. The condemned men couldn’t do more than make dull thuds and slaps and, given the pervasive chill in the air, even that hurt their hands. Genthry knew from experience. Still, they saluted their dying comrade as best they could.

Genthry didn’t acknowledge them as he passed, at least not with more than a quick glance through the eye slit in their doors. He didn’t want to cause any of them into more trouble than they were already in. Talking was forbidden on Death Row, and while they were already facing death, there was plenty the guards could do to make the waiting even less pleasant.

He blinked when he emerged into the fresher air of the surface. The last time he’d been on a planet with air this damp, the planet’s surface had consisted entirely of water. The sunlight made a sharp contrast here. When both suns were up, the place might heat up so far as to be sticky. It wouldn’t be warm, but it wouldn’t be cold.

My parting gift to you, he thought, and laughed at his own absurdity.

The head guard nudged him. His beady eyes, mud-colored like most humans’, were narrowed with suspicion. “What’s so funny?”

“Someday,” Genthry told him with a sincere grin, “you’ll be on the point of death yourself. And when you are, there will be thoughts running through your head. I honestly hope you’ll be able to laugh at them too.”

The head guard snorted. “You’ve lost your mind.”

“Maybe.” Genthry didn’t bear the man any specific ill will, but he didn’t like him enough to want to stand there and debate him either.

The guards gave him a little push. “You going to climb the stairs yourself, or do we have to drag you?”

Genthry looked up the stairs to the scaffold and swallowed, hard. Going out with some dignity had seemed easy in that little cell. Now that he was out here, having to climb up steep stairs in nothing but what he’d been wearing at birth, hands bound before him, he quailed. He didn’t want to do this. He knew what awaited him at the top. He could see the shadow of the Reactor already, even if he couldn’t see the machine itself. It would be seconds, once he got up there.

So many things he hadn’t done yet. So many people he hadn’t saved. He hadn’t fallen in love yet, either. He hadn’t set up a home, hadn’t built a life for himself. He was only twenty-four, for crying out loud. For a slave, that might be ancient. For anyone else in the Republic, he was practically still a child.

Quit your sniveling. You’ve already done more than you had any right to expect. Move your ass up those stairs and be glad you got as far as you did. He snarled at himself and took the stairs two at a time. Every second of life since he’d been deemed old enough to work had been borrowed time, or rather stolen. He should be proud of himself for that, instead of upset about what he hadn’t gotten.

The top of the scaffold wasn’t much. It was a bare, gray rock platform with two leg manacles sticking out of it. Genthry strode over to it and stood with his feet shoulder width apart. He set his jaw again and chose to ignore the greasy, ashy smear beneath his heels. Would it have killed these guys to clean up after themselves? He supposed they didn’t care what criminals like him saw, or what they felt about it.

Executions no longer took place in public, not even out here on the Margin. There wasn’t anyone out here but the guards, the person operating the Reactor, and Genthry himself. Neither of the guards had been expecting Genthry to show so much initiative, so they had to rush to catch up to him.

He took deep breaths to calm himself, even though his heart slammed against his ribcage. These were the last breaths he would ever take. The hazy red sun rising over the eastern horizon was the last thing he would ever see. The last thing he would hear was the hum of the Reactor charging up, the last scent—

Well, the last scent would probably be his own burning flesh. And the last thing he would feel probably wouldn’t be the cold metal cutting into his wrists, it would be searing pain. But for now, those things would suffice.

The Reactor’s hum hiccupped. He tilted his head to the side. He’d heard the Reactor warm up a few times over the past week or so, and he thought he had a pretty good handle on the process. It typically ran smoothly, until a brief flash of light was followed by pure silence. Hiccups weren’t typically part of the process.

The stink of burning cordite reached his nostrils. The head guard, who’d bent down to attach a shackle to Genthry’s left leg, stood up. “Do you smell something?”

“I’m not sure if that’s normal or not, but it doesn’t exactly smell pleasant.” Genthry wrinkled his nose.

The scaffold shook as an explosion rocked the prison yard. Genthry fell to the ground.

He wasn’t the only one. Both guards toppled as thick and acrid smoke filled the air.

Genthry had no idea if the explosion had released the radiation the Reactor used to kill its victims, or if it was still safely contained. All he knew was that the smoke and the confusion created an opportunity. He leaped to his feet. The head guard had hit his head in the fall. He lay on the scaffold, not unconscious but stunned.

Genthry squatted and took the head guard’s blaster and the key to his cuffs. “Good luck with your family and your second job,” he said, as an alarm sounded in the distance. “I know this won’t be easy on you.”

The other guard struggled to his feet, blaster at the ready. Genthry’s hands were still bound, but that wasn’t a barrier. He fired his stolen blaster and got the other man right between the eyes. Then he jumped up to the top of the prison wall.

The wall was high, there was no mistaking that. Jumping was a risk. It was better to die running, a free man, than boiling to death from the inside while bound to a rock. The danger was that he wouldn’t die but break a leg, or worse, and wind up right back here and unable to fight.

He spotted something dangling from the wall. Someone had left him a rope, perfect for climbing. Could he trust it?

He used the key to unlock his cuffs and rappelled down the wall. Rappelling while naked wasn’t exactly something he would recommend to anyone, ever, but this was a matter of life and death.

He landed on the cold, soft ground and took off running. Most of Kindara was bare rock, but a small copse of trees stood within sight of the prison. Genthry had seen it often from his cell. If there was any place a naked guy with magenta skin could hide on this stupid planet, it would be there. A grin spread slowly across his face as he ran, but he didn’t let himself gloat more than that. Not yet. He still had too much to do.

He’d survived so far. He wouldn’t survive long on Kindara. There weren’t many Ayak on Kindara, and there were no half-Ayak here at all. He stood out, and he knew it. He needed clothes, and a ship, in that order.

But he’d gotten out of the immediate danger, and he’d had help doing it. He had no idea who’d helped him, but if one person here had helped him, someone else probably would too. He was hardly the only radical abolitionist in the Republic, and he would survive to fight another day.

The sun had fully emerged over the horizon, burning off the haze.