Chapter Four

 

 

I’D FAILED TO sleep much on the journey south across Titan’s unforgiving deserts. Partly because Brennan had fallen asleep, and he was snoring so loud I could hear him over the roar of the engines.

But mostly it was because I was hungry.

When you first learn that pretty much all your stored or growing food is gone, the initial feeling is shock, maybe mixed with a little fear for the future. An hour later, the shock has dissipated—you’ve accepted the situation—but the fear for the future has grown to fill the void, and then some.

There was food on the bus. Emergency rations locked away behind a battered steel panel close to the driver’s seat. Semi-solid fudge-like blocks for the others, tubes of paste for me. I could eat the blocks if I had no choice: I’d have to squash them up first, then use my fingers to push the mash in through the hole in my throat. Very messy, but better than starvation.

I realised I was staring at the battered steel panel again, and looked away... only to see that Takenaga was staring at it too.

There was enough food in that panel to keep the five of us going for a week. Ten days if we stretched it out.

Thirteen days if we killed Southern Brennan before he got hold of any.

An unwelcome thought jumped to the front of the line: We could survive for a month if we killed and ate Brennan.

I shook my head briskly, a feeble attempt to scare away the unsettling image. It didn’t work. He’s almost solid muscle. Protein. Brennan weighs at least one-twenty-five kilograms, and a kilogram of meat yields about two thousand calories. That’s two hundred and fifty thousand calories he’s carrying around. Say we restrict each prisoner to five hundred calories per day. That’s five hundred portions.

Over two hundred prisoners and guards... Brennan could feed all of us for two days.

I abruptly stood up, hoping that the sudden movement would snap me away from that train of thought.

Across the aisle, Takenaga flinched, her hand once again moving towards her sick-stick. “What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Foot-cramp.”

I walked the length of the bus and back a couple of times, but my gaze kept returning to that silver panel. And I could see that the others were in the same situation.

It had been about six hours since I’d eaten. Not long at all, really.

But the notion that within a couple of weeks I’d be starving to death was hard to shake. The mild hunger pangs I felt now were nothing compared with what lay ahead.

We’ll each have one food-block now. No, don’t be greedy. We’ll have one between all of us. Except me. I’ll have a single squirt from one of the tubes. Just about a mouthful, that’s all. Keep us going for another few hours. We won’t be so hungry when we get to the base and we’ll be able to think straight.

And we’re probably going to find literally tonnes of food at the base, anyway. We could eat all of our emergency rations now and that would be a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of stuff we’ll be bringing back to the prison.

This all makes sense, in a way, because the prison was secretly supplying the base with food for years, so now we’re just reaping the benefits of that. It’s karma. You get out of life what you put into it. We sowed, now we get to reap.

The base might even have its own gardens. Fresh food, how great would that be?

Again, I stopped myself. I’d had fresh food that morning.

Behind me, Southern Brennan snorted himself awake, then sat up. “Gruddamn, I’m hungry.”

Sloane said, “Quit that. We have to ration it. The supplies we have on board belong to the whole prison, not just us.”

Clearly, she had been thinking along the same lines as I had. As we all had.

Brennan said, “We should take an inventory, just so we know. What if the bus breaks down and we get stranded? We’re gonna need to know how long we’ll survive.”

“Cut that out, Brennan, right now!” Takenaga said. “We all ate this morning. We can eat again tomorrow morning.”

I dropped down into a seat, and glanced towards Zera Kurya. She was staring straight ahead, but not at the enticing silver panel—she was looking out through the windshield.

“You okay?” I asked her.

Without looking at me, she said, “I skipped breakfast.”

“What?” I shuffled closer to her. “Why?”

“Heavy period. Always makes me feel queasy in the mornings.” Her eyes flicked towards me for a moment. “I’m regretting it now.”

I sat back. We’re on a mission. Can’t carry out a mission on an empty stomach. We wouldn’t be able to think straight. We’d miss something.

For the good of everyone, we ought to eat.

I began, “Takenaga...”

Without turning around to face me, she said, “That’s sub-warden Takenaga. And the answer is no.”

“I’m just—”

“No. We have an obligation to everyone else back at the colony.”

Brennan smirked. “Right. The colony. You ever notice that, Dredd? The guards refer to the place as a colony. See, we’re colonists, not prisoners.”

I hadn’t noticed that, but he was right. And I wasn’t about to admit that to him. “Sure, I know that. They’ve always done it. Makes them feel better about their crappy jobs.”

“That’s enough,” Takenaga said.

Brennan laughed, and I couldn’t help thinking that if I killed him, it’d probably be best to do it quick. A bullet through the head. Maybe tear out his throat. Anything slower might spoil the meat.

And Brennan wasn’t the only one I wanted to see gone. I could have named two dozen prisoners whose absence would only improve the place. Each prisoner we kill, butcher and eat is one less mouth to feed, I thought.

Horrifying as that was, I couldn’t help but follow it up with the mental image of a rescue ship reaching the prison some months in the future, and its crew disembarking to find that the prison population had been reduced to five or six massively overweight inmates using the backs of their hands to wipe the gravy away from their mouths, before belching and tossing fresh human femurs onto an already teetering pile of bones.

Drokk that. I don’t care how hungry I get, I am notresorting to cannibalism.

 

 

I WAS STRETCHED out across two seats, lying on my side and trying not to think about how my stomach’s gurgles weren’t just audible, they were echoing, when Sloane called out, “Dredd? We’re close.”

I sat up. “How close?”

“You want time or distance?”

“Both.”

“Three kilometres, ten minutes at our current speed.”

I made my way towards the front of the bus as Sloane eased off the throttle and gently applied the brakes. She said, “This is almost exactly where we stopped last time.”

Takenaga said, “Phoebe, that was five years ago. How can you remember that?”

“You’re good at your job, I’m good at mine.” Sloane turned to me. “How do you want to play this? Same as before?”

“Yeah. We climb over the ridge, get a view of the base from above. Once we know for sure that it’s abandoned—or if it’s not, but they don’t seem overly eager to massacre us—we’ll call you in.” I glanced back at Kurya and Brennan. “You two up for some climbing?”

We went through the usual undignified process of passing through the bus’s airlock one by one, which wasn’t easy for Brennan because his shoulders were so wide he could barely fit through even without an environment suit, and as we trudged towards the hill, I was not looking forward to the fun and games we’d have loading the bus up with crates of food if we couldn’t find a way to get the bus into the base’s hangar... Open the bus’s outer airlock door, load it up with crates, close the outer door, cycle the airlock’s air, open the inner door, someone inside lifts the crates out of the airlock and stows them away. Then close the inner door, extract the air again because you don’t want to waste too much oxygen. Repeat until bus is full or there are no more crates.

If the engineers who’d put the bus together had been smart enough to foresee this sort of problem, they might have adapted the air-pumps to be able to extract the air from the whole bus; then we could open up the long-since-welded-shut rear doors and load up the crates that way. We’d get the whole job done in a tenth of the time.

Maybe we could even do that now, I thought. If we can find the right sort of equipment in the base, we could make those adaptations ourselves. I’ve never welded anything, but it can’t be that hard to learn. I can certainly rig up an air pump.

As these thoughts rattled around, a deeper, more primitive part of my consciousness understood exactly what the rest of my brain was doing: distracting me from the hunger, and from thinking about the possibility that there might not be crates to load onto the bus.

For all we knew, Huygens Base might not be there at all. It had originally been a ship, so whoever inherited the place from the late, unlamented Colonel Peter D’Angelo could have just fired up the engines and flown away.

We were about halfway up the hill—steep enough that we had to use our hands to climb—when Southern Brennan said, “It’s Schroedinger’s Pantry. Until we get there and can ascertain the truth, the base both does and does not have supplies.”

Kurya laughed a little at that, which—I freely admit—angered me. Brennan’s comment was more clever than funny, and it wasn’t even that clever. She was my friend, not his. She knew how much Brennan and I despised each other. Petty, I know, but hunger can have a strange effect on a person. Brennan was becoming more talkative, Kurya was getting giddy, and I was growing jealous for no good reason.

It had now been almost ten hours since breakfast. I’d had the usual: bowl of oatmeal, a grey-skinned apple from the gardens—run through the blender—and half a tube of Supplementary, the cardboard-flavoured paste with all the vitamins and minerals a prisoner might need for the day.

I could have had a second apple, but I hadn’t been in the mood. Or I could have had toast, though I rarely bothered with bread-based products because I couldn’t chew. The one time I did try to eat a bread roll by breaking it up into small pieces and pushing them in through my throat-hole, well, it didn’t work out. Regurgitating food is an unpleasant sensation at the best of times; it’s worse when the only exit point is the hole in your throat and not your mouth. And out on the surface of Titan, in the sub-zero air and low gravity, an arc of instantly-frozen vomit can reach quite a distance before it hits the ground and shatters into a million pieces.

A little ahead of me, Brennan said, “If the base is there, and every part of it is fully functioning, I say we take control. Fly it off this damn moon. You must have contacts out there, Kurya. People who can help us.”

“We’re not doing that,” I said. “We steal a military vessel, they’d shoot us down without thinking. Besides, there’s nowhere to go. The bases on Mimas and Dione and Tethys are controlled by the military, and they’re constantly on alert. Even if we could make it as far as Jupiter without being detected, the patrols to and from the Ganymede Installation would rip us to shreds.” I stopped climbing for a moment. “Trust me, I’ve had five years to think about this from every angle. Our only hope would be to head out into deep space, but the ship doesn’t have an FTL drive, so best-case scenario is that we get picked up by a friendly interstellar transport before we run out of food or air. The odds against that happening are billions to one against, and that’s if they’re looking for us.”

Brennan had stopped too, and was looking back at me. “You getting tired, Dredd?”

“No.”

“Hunger getting to you?”

“Don’t push it, Brennan. I don’t care how big you are—I’d have no problems bringing you down. You know that.”

He smirked. “Sure. Yeah.”

Kurya had continued climbing, and now called back, “You are both fools. Conserve your energy.”

She was right, and both Brennan and I knew it. We moved on, now almost side-by-side.

His gloves were tight on his massive hands, his muscles almost bulging through the fabric of his environment suit. One burst seam...

We were out of sight of the bus, and Kurya was about eight metres ahead of us, concentrating on her climbing.

Do it now, I told myself. Tear one of the seams on his back. He won’t be able to reach around to patch it. He’ll suffocate in seconds. I’ll keep climbing, and by the time Kurya notices, it’ll be too late.

Sadly missed, a tragic end, just when we were becoming friends. I wish I could tell you what happened, but we were all exhausted, starving, putting every last erg into the climb. At one point I looked back to see how he was doing but I thought he was just taking a break. If only I had realised...

This was a very entertaining notion, but not even close to realistic. The climb wasn’t that bad, the hill not really that high. Kurya had already reached the top.

“What do you see?” I called.

“It’s there.”

Behind me, Brennan muttered, “Thank you, Grud!”

As I stopped next to Kurya, I pointed towards the near side of the base. From this distance the whole thing looked like a natural plateau, but we knew that was a disguise. “The hole in the hull was down there... There was light coming out last time, but I remember we shut it off before we left. Your eyes are better than mine, Zera—what can you see?”

“Just shadows. I think the rupture is still here. That suggests no one else has been here since us.” She glanced at me, then back to Brennan. “Next step?”

I said, “Let’s get down there.”