by Jaxon Reed
Mrs. Cruz retreated to their quarters, and stayed there almost a week. Dee Dee stayed with her so she wouldn’t be alone. Finally, Mrs. Cruz reemerged, but she never did appear to be her old self. A certain sadness seemed to settle over her the rest of her time on Redwood.
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Time passed.
We settled into something of a routine. Soldiers, Technicians, Researchers, Servants. Everybody chipped in and helped where they were needed. For the first time, Redwood City seemed almost egalitarian. Even though people tended to stay in the roles the State had assigned us, there was far more interaction between folks than ever before. Some of us even ate at the same tables for meals.
I wondered if it would all last, or if everyone would resegregate when they returned to New Texas.
All structural repairs were finished. The elevators were fixed, and patches over the holes in the floors were completed. Damages to the walls were repaired, holes made by ray guns filled in. The disabled load bots were brought back online. Food production and crop cultivation resumed.
Redwood City went back to good as new. It had never seen too much wear to begin with, since so few people inhabited it. I suspected there were nooks and crannies that nobody has ever set foot in since it was first built.
Things seemed almost back to normal. Our first supply ship came in from New Texas. We sent some things back, including some injured people who needed more advanced medical care than we could offer.
Eventually, the Colonel decided to head back to New Texas, too. He overloaded two of his ships with soldiers, leaving behind one ship and two dozen men who volunteered to stay a while longer. He placed them under Major Moore’s command.
“I don’t know that you’ll need them,” he said. “But maybe you can put them to good use.”
Greenberg brought back Phang’s armor with him, as well as suits belonging to the other GPs Phang had killed before commencing his assault. The Colonel also took the disabled synethetics that hadn’t self-destructed, and all but two of the ray guns.
Several people back on New Texas were anxious to get their hands on this advanced technology that heretofore had been restricted to the inner planets. New Texas A&M Scientists were anxious to reverse engineer everything and give our own weapons capabilities a major boost.
All the soldiers lined up at the spaceport and boarded the ships in an organized fashion. Before boarding, Greenberg gave us a short, inspirational speech while we stood assembled at the dock. Then he shook hands, pausing to share a few words with several of us in turn.
When he came to me, he said, “Good job, Savitch. Good job. You’re welcome in the military any time, you and your wife both.”
I grinned at the statement, but I bit my tongue to keep from making a sarcastic reply. Instead I thanked him, and shook his hand.
I had no doubt the military would love to have us. I also had no doubt we would never join up, if we could help it. I suspected the temptation to make others like us would prove too great for the bureaucrats.
Colonel Greenberg climbed aboard his spacecraft, the last man in, and paused to wave at everybody before the door shut.
I heard Physician Patel say, “That man’s got a future in politics.”
As soon as both ships flew out of view, Sergeant Sledge retrieved a stogie from his shirt pocket and clamped it between his teeth. Sarge had avoided chewing them in front of the Colonel, who’d made no secret of his disdain for tobacco.
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Word came back from Old Earth and the inner planets. Overall, the University Revolution had been mostly successful. Often the State tried to violently suppress it, but just as often resistance survived and even flourished. The State discovered that once tasted, freedom is a hard beast to conquer.
There were wars and battles fought on almost every planet, except Orange where the prison staff didn’t seem to care who was in charge back home. A few other exceptions occurred, like on the lightly populated Pacifica. There, the people addressed State representatives with a list of demands for democratic reform. The Agents and others agreed, and that was that. It was one of the few peaceful transitions, though. On most planets, the State did not let go of power so easily.
But as the weeks turned into months, and quantum communicators (another previously restricted technology) spread throughout the string, we heard of more and more planets falling either completely or at least partly under University charters. Even Old Earth held democratic elections for the first time in ages. Eventually, New Texas brought home their gunships guarding the Janus leading from Orange to Old Earth.
Peace and order, for the most part, was restored throughout the string, and oppression from the State was lifted. The seeds planted by Twelve and other secret societies had finally come to fruition.
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A few weeks after the Colonel departed, and things settled into our new routines without so many additional people around, the Professor revealed to us the secret of what he had done with the hematophagous primates, the “vampire monkeys” that he and other researchers were convinced were an integral part of Redwood’s ecosystem.
Several of us followed him out to Agricultural Experiment Station 12 in quadcopters. I brought along a tombstone we had made for Schmidt’s grave. When we arrived, Jason and Jacob helped me carry it over to the spot I’d buried his body. We used a shovel and dug a little trench for it at the head of the grave, then slid it down into place. It read, “Alvin Schmidt, NTAMU Class of ’38.”
I thought he’d be proud of it, if he could see it. I recalled I had tossed his Aggie ring in, too, before covering his body with dirt. Schmidt had been a good Aggie, notwithstanding the fact he was an Agent of the State. I felt bad about killing him, even though it was in self defense.
We said a few words over the grave in a little ceremony. I closed us with a prayer, then we went inside to join the others.
Schmidt had told me that AES 12 was special. Agents hid weapons and field equipment there, which came in handy for our assault on Redwood City. It turns out Professor Cruz knew about some secret rooms there, too.
We walked through a concealed door in a false wall near the back of the building, and down a wide flight of stairs to a hidden basement. There, fourteen cryogenic containers were lined up on the floor. They were rectangular, each about fifteen feet long, five feet high and eight feet wide.
Inside each container, a vampire monkey was frozen in suspended animation.
When we walked in, Professor Cruz looked up and smiled. Everybody had gathered around one of the containers. Each unit had been marked with coordinates indicating which colony they belonged to and where they were captured.
The Professor nodded to the nearest container.
“This is Fred.”
Jacob and Jason and I smiled. We bent down to peer through a small window at the primate’s face. Sure enough, it was Fred, the monkey who had bitten so many Researchers in the early days of Redwood’s colonization. In turn, I had been bitten by one of those men on Orange and Dee Dee had been bitten by Fred directly.
So far as we knew, she and I were the last hematophagous humans, the last of the vampires who had come into existence because of Fred.
“We captured every one we knew about in the forest, and three more we discovered while looking. Then we put them in cryo and moved them out here for safekeeping. I couldn’t bear to destroy the specimens. They are a part of the ecosystem here. They’re unique.
“Of course I had help capturing them. The Rangers and some of the others helped me safely tranquilize the monkeys throughout the forest, and place them in cryo back at the station. But I alone moved them here for safekeeping. I used load bots to help me, and I made sure no records were kept. Nobody else knew. I sincerely hoped the day would come when I’d be able to reintroduce these specimens back into the environment in which they belong.”
I couldn’t disagree with the Professor’s reasoning. It seemed risky, in retrospect, to not completely destroy the animals with all
that was at stake. But I couldn’t blame him for trying to preserve something unique to this world. Especially since he had devoted so much of his life to studying them.
Still, a note of sadness hung in the air. The monkeys had cost him Connie’s life. Another fact floating around unspoken was the possible futility of all he had done.
I decided to voice it.
“The cat’s out of the bag, though. It’s like nuclear bombs. Once the technology is discovered, its spread is inevitable. In this case, there’s always going to be somebody looking to live forever, or create an army of indestructible soldiers.”
The Professor nodded, acknowledging the uncomfortable reality we all faced.
“Maybe we can slow it down, though. There’s talk of reconfiguring the Janus rings. One of the last things we’ll do after we leave is destroy the ones in orbit around Redwood, Janus Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine. Then they’ll configure a new one connecting Orange with New Texas.
“People will still be able to get back here, but it will take a ship at least a hundred and fifty standard years to come from New Texas, and even longer from Orange. At least it won’t be easy, and maybe the human race can survive a few centuries longer without a tyrant like Phang becoming a vampire and ruling over them.”
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We spent a week moving the cryo containers to the Ranger station. It was a slow and tedious task. We kept power supplies connected to the containers, carefully moved them out of the basement and into a cargo copter, then flew them over the many miles to Ranger Station Alpha.
Once we collected them all on the station’s landing pad, we had to figure out how to place them throughout the forest near the original locations they had been taken. We solved that by flying the cargo copter over the tree tops and lowering the containers down to rest on large branches below, near the appropriate locations. We set up remotes to open the containers and let the monkeys thaw out with no humans nearby.
Once the monkeys woke up and left the area, we returned with the copter and retrieved the cryo units so they wouldn’t litter the forest.
One brainy idea the Professor had while rounding up and tranquilizing the specimens was to implant trackers in all the monkeys.
“I was thinking if we needed to find them again, it would be a lot easier if we knew where they were. But now that we’re leaving I guess it’s all rather pointless. At least the trackers will be innocuous. They won’t hurt the monkeys, and they’ll never even know they’re there.”
I felt compelled to speak up again.
“And what if, a hundred fifty, two hundred years from now, somebody does revisit Redwood? These guys will be alive, and if you have a perpetual power supply in the tracking devices, they’ll be able to easily find all the specimens. At least Phang and his men had to rely on bio sensors, which slowed them down a little.”
The Professor grimaced, but he realized I was right. We extracted the tracking devices from all the monkeys before letting them go.
We had cams trained on the container left on a branch by the colony nearest the Ranger station. This was the one we called “Monkey City,” and subject to our best surveillance thanks to its relative proximity to the research team’s old home.
We restored the com center the Joneses had destroyed, or at least enough of it to get a signal from the cams nearby. One of them was trained directly on Fred’s cryo unit.
It didn’t take very long after we gathered around the monitor to see signs of life from the deactivated container. We watched as Fred stirred, then sat up, his head poking over the top as if rising out of a giant coffin. He looked around in confusion. Then he climbed out of the container and stood unsteadily on his feet.
After a moment he seemed to regain his composure. A sound off in the distance attracted his attention.
Dee Dee said, “A foraging party is headed his way.”
Our old tracking system still worked. We watched on another monitor as green dots representing monkeys headed closer to Fred’s position.
Back on the cam monitor, we watched as he jumped down to a lower branch and threw himself up against the trunk of the tree. Fred stood motionless for several minutes as the gathering party approached, picking berries along the way.
A scout jumped up to Fred’s branch. He paused to sniff the air, listen and look around. When he turned his back, Fred jumped on him, screaming like a banshee.
Before the victim had time to react, Fred ripped out his neck with his teeth, and sucked down several gulps of blood.
Jacob laughed at the macabre sight. He said, “Welcome back, Fred.”
Chapter Fourteen
We had a load bot grab a large rock from the desert and carry it up to the bubble on the roof. We placed it in the cemetery up there, and one of the Technicians etched the names of everyone who had died.
Major Moore and Professor Cruz said a few words, then Andrea offered a short prayer. It was a nice ceremony. Cathartic.
Earlier we had a debate about whether or not to include Phang in the cemetery. Some were adamantly opposed to burying him beside those he killed, suggesting he and the other three GPs should instead be buried out on the edge of the desert where they had spent the night before Phang’s assault.
Professor Cruz finally agreed, trying to keep the peace. I pointed out the State had forbidden human burial on Redwood’s surface probably because they were afraid the vampire monkeys might uncover the bodies. It was just fear of the unknown.
It was a ridiculous notion. The dead stayed dead, as we had seen in our attempts to save Connie. So it seemed fitting to go on and bury the GPs out there as a final snub to the wishes of bureaucrats back on Old Earth.
We transported Phang’s body out there, along with a load bot who dug a hole big enough for all four. After burying them, we etched “Phang & 3 GPs” on a nearby boulder with the industrial drill I had used to disable the last synthetic.
The next day, Professor Cruz found me.
“You remember what you said after the Battle of Redwood when we buried Milton, David, and Susan up on top of the cube?”
I nodded. The Ngs and Professor Kalinowski were killed in our assault on Redwood City when it was still under State control. Originally, we were going to bury them back at the Ranger station, but Head Servant Adams had strenuously protested due to State restrictions.
I suggested to the Professor at the time that we could bury them in the garden on the roof to keep the peace and reinter their bodies later.
“I don’t think anybody will mind if we move their bodies now.”
I agreed. Adams was the only one who had protested back then, and he was dead now.
We had some bots dig up their coffins, then transported them all the way out to Ranger Station Alpha. We buried them near the foot of the station’s giant tree and put up headstones for them. We brought Connie’s remains with us, too. We buried her there and cried some fresh tears.
I looked back at the four tombstones at the base of the giant tree one last time before climbing into a QC.
I felt it highly appropriate for their remains to become part of Redwood. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Ngs and Professor Kalinowski loved this planet and everything about it.
Connie was part of Redwood, too. She would be the first, last, and only human to have been both born and killed on Redwood. This was the only home she had ever known. She never left.
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Jason, Jacob, Charlie, Andrea, Dee Dee and I continued our studies at New Texas A&M via distance education. I regretted not being able to spend more time on campus. The year I spent in New Bryan was one of my best ever. But with online classes we were able to fast track our credits, and everybody graduated at the same time. I received a Bachelor of Science in Exozoology. Dee Dee’s was in Exobiology.
One of the last supply ships from New Texas brought us our Aggie rings. The Professor and the other Aggies held a ring ceremony for us, and inducted us all into the Redwood City New Texas A&M Alumni Club, which had been active ev
er since they had taken over from the State.
The club’s next order of business was to hold muster for all the fallen Aggies who died under Phang’s assault. Each of their names were read aloud in a solemn ceremony. One of us stood and said, “Here,” for each name called out, and we lit a candle for each one.
I still find myself looking down at my Aggie ring and smiling. I have a lot of pride at the accomplishment and the group of people it represents. It’s ironic because I remember how much Aggies used to annoy me, with their pride and exuberant love for the University. But now, having gone through the process, I understand and I feel the same way.
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Another few months passed, and the triplets decided to get married all at once. Jacob and Andrea increasingly spent time alone together, which wasn’t hard to do in that giant cubic city with so few people.
One day when several of us were eating supper together in the suites on Level 25, Jacob stood up and announced to his parents and everybody else that he and Andrea were getting married.
After a round of congratulations and backslaps, Jason stood up too.
“It’s funny you should say that, brother. Charlie and I were discussing it, and we too have decided we’re going to get married.”
Another round of surprised outburst followed, along with congratulations. Jacob stared daggers at Jason for stealing his thunder, but he didn’t say anything.
For that, I was grateful. Both had shown considerable maturity since we returned to Redwood. Before, something like this would have led to a nasty fight.
Later, in a weekly phone call back to New Texas, Jeremy told his parents the news that he and Paris were engaged. They informed him of his brothers’ intentions. So, that’s how we ended up having a triple wedding via telepresence.
Andrea and Charlie decided it would be neat to get married in the little chapel back on Ranger Station Alpha. Jeremy and Paris reserved the All Faiths Chapel at New Texas A&M. Dee Dee and I sprang for the telepresence session as a gift to all three couples.
The couples walked down their respective aisles and Pastor Bob married them simultaneously. We watched the holograms of Paris and Jeremy while they could see the holograms of Jason, Jacob, Charlie and Andrea back on campus.