Chapter Thirteen

 

 

IT WAS TEMPTING, I can’t deny that. I could approach Carbonara and say, hey, include me in your group and I’ll get the power restored.

But I couldn’t do that. Carbonara ruled by force and by withholding vital resources. Fighting against that sort of regime was the reason I was on Titan in the first place.

It wasn’t like they could outwait me. I could go without food for days, if I had to. But in an hour, maybe less, the last of the residual heat would be gone and any inmate who wasn’t a mod would freeze, and then all the food was mine for the taking.

I looked down at Dustin Enigenburg huddled in his blanket. I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want any of them to die. But the truth was there just wasn’t enough food for everyone, so some of us were going to die no matter what decision I made.

Which meant that the only logical course of action was that I had to choose who lived and who died. After all, I had the power. Over everyone. Not just the other inmates.

I held all the cards.

I told Dustin, “Stay put. And forget that stomm about sleeping on the floor. Keep as warm as you can, because it’s going to get a lot colder before this is done.”

I stepped out of the cell and into the atrium. It was quiet, with only the occasional rasping breath or soft cough to let me know that the bundles scattered across the floor contained human beings. But not for much longer, the way things were going.

I strode towards the centre of the atrium, aware that the generator room was probably still very warm, and if I died in the next few minutes, there was a strong chance that Genoa might not order the power to be reactivated in time to save everyone else. Would that make me the killer, or her?

A voice from my right: “Who the drokkin’ hell...?”

I turned to see Fawn Svendsen staring at me. He was standing in front of the closed doors to the block’s small gymnasium, wearing an environment suit without the helmet and carrying a sharpened metal pole fashioned from a table leg.

Svendsen backed away a little as I started towards him. “Dredd, is that you?” His breath was clouding so heavily in the air that I almost couldn’t see his face through it. “How did you get in? We got every door and window...” He stopped, looking past me. His head tilted backwards as his gaze followed the rope up to the vent in the ceiling. “Drokk me sideways!”

I pulled the metal pole from his feeble grip—he was unable to hold it in his right hand, thanks to his earlier encounter with Genoa—then flipped it around and held the sharpened end up to his throat.

“Do it,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Do it. Power’s gone and even if it does come back, we’re gonna starve long before the ships get here. Do it, Rico.”

I didn’t. But I did crack him on the side of the head with the edge of the pole. He crumpled to the floor and a trickle of steam rose from the blood that briefly seeped from the wound before it began to freeze.

I had to move fast.

Carbonara and her entourage had to be in the gymnasium: it was the only room with enough space for all of them. And clearly Svendsen had been assigned to guard the doors.

I dragged Svendsen aside, then thumped on the door with my fist and called, “We need help out here! They’re tryna get in!”

I stepped back into the shadow and the doors burst open, disgorging two dozen of Carbonara’s acolytes in a mass, a freezing and frenzied swarm. They seemed to all be armed with shivs, or that old favourite of the inmates of crumbling prisons, the half-brick in a pillowcase.

I quickly stepped inside, closed the doors after me, and jammed Fawn Svendsen’s table leg between the door handles, effectively locking it.

On the other side of the small gymnasium, Pastor Carbonara stood in the middle of a cluster of her most loyal followers, with the hostages Copus and Aldrich trussed up on the floor nearby. Aldrich was clearly unconscious, but Copus was watching everything. Behind them, the entire back wall, about a fifth of the room, was taken up with crates of food and emergency rations.

Carbonara stared at me in surprise through the visor of her environment suit. “What...? Rico Dredd?”

“It’s over,” I said.

One of her followers was carrying a guard’s gun, and he made a move towards Copus.

“Don’t,” I warned. “It’s over. I control the power. Kill me and in a few minutes most of your people will start losing digits to frostbite. But that won’t matter, because half an hour after that, they’ll be frozen solid.” To Carbonara, I said, “Concede or die. You have no other options.”

Behind me, someone started banging on the doors, but I figured my makeshift bar would hold long enough.

Carbonara said, “Join me, Neophyte Dredd. Brother Rico. We will unite our houses under Grud’s gracious and forgiving eye and our partnership will... Our partner-ship will be the only vessel capable of sailing the rough seas of the coming months. Buoyed aloft by Grud’s will and compassion, He will be the wind that blows the sails and lends us the strength we need to reach the calm harbour of—”

“You really are just making this stomm up as you go along, aren’t you?”

The banging on the door hadn’t stopped, and I had to step further into the room for Carbonara and her people to hear me. “Take down the barricades and release your hostages. I won’t tell you again.”

“No.”

“I can wait. Can you?”

“With Grud’s help, we can wait an eternity.”

I looked around at her followers. “You’re the only one wearing an environment suit, Pastor. My guess is that your friends here are already losing the sensation in their hands. Finding it hard to hold onto their weapons. Certainly, they lack the strength to fight me one-to-one. All at once they might have a chance, but they’d want to get started right now. Every second they delay is another percentage point off their likelihood of success.”

No one moved any closer to me. I knew then that I’d already won. The banging on the doors was starting to weaken.

“Let’s say they’ve got a fifty per cent chance of taking me down. Forty-nine. Forty-eight. And they have to do it without killing me because I’m the only one who can get the heat turned back on. Forty-four. Forty-three—”

The man closest to Copus tossed his shiv to the ground and stepped away.

That broke the seal: the rest of them did the same, leaving Pastor Carbonara on her own in the centre of the room.

She was muttering something under her breath, and I had to step closer to hear.

“Please don’t take this away from me.”

I turned to one of her former followers, a man I knew only as Waterman. “Open the doors. Get all your people to work on breaking down the barricades. The sooner they do that, the sooner we can have the heat restored.”

As Waterman moved towards the doors, I grabbed one of the shivs from the floor and started to cut through Copus’s bonds. He was still glaring at the Pastor. I’d known him a long time, watched him deal with a lot of different situations, but I’d never seen that look in his eyes before.

Behind us, Waterman had opened the doors, and I turned to see Carbonara’s half-frozen acolytes staring back in at me. The fight had gone out of them. Waterman simply said, “It’s over,” and the crowd dissipated. They no longer cared about the crates of food they’d worked so hard to acquire and protect. Now, their brains were filled with cold and little else.

“The barricades,” I reminded Waterman.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure thing, Dredd.”

As I started work on the ropes around Aldrich’s wrists, Copus stretched slowly, then painfully pushed himself to his feet. “You did good.” His voice was weak, but steady. “You’ve got to get the power back on, Dredd.”

“I know. I—”

“Now. Leave him—I’ll look after him, and protect the supplies.” He leaned down and snatched up his gun. “Just go.”

I nodded and headed for the door. I knew what was coming next. I guess even Pastor Carbonara did, too.

Before I’d even left the room, the gunshot echoed throughout the prison.

 

 

THE DOORWAY BETWEEN D-Block and C-Block had been barricaded by two guards’ desks, five prisoners’ bunks and Grud knew how many large pieces of gym equipment. Dustin and Waterman were among the inmates staring up at it.

Waterman told me, “We can’t... It’s sealed. Everything’s just jammed in too tight, and now it’s iced over.”

It didn’t take a structural engineer to see that he was right. Even if the inmates weren’t suffering from hypothermia and starvation, it would have been a difficult task. They’d sealed themselves up nice and tight, knowing that they had all the supplies.

“Just... Just bring it down. It can’t be that hard,” I said.

Waterman raised his right hand: the palm was drenched with blood, the skin torn away in strips. There was a corresponding bloodstain on one of the steel bunk-frames. “It’s going to take too long to pull it down.” He glanced back the way we’d come. “Can’t you get back out through the roof?”

The answer was no. As I’d passed through the atrium, I’d noticed that the rope, like almost everything else now, was slick with frozen condensation. And if the rope was iced, so was the vent. Low gravity or not, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull myself up.

“What about the window?” I asked. There was only one window on the ground floor, in the guards’ office.

Shivering, Dustin, said, “You d-drokkin’ c-crazy? Break the w-window and we all suffocate!”

“So it’s the doorway or nothing,” I said. I grabbed hold of the nearest bunk-frame and started to pull. Nothing. No movement at all. “Get ropes, get blankets,” I snarled. “Wrap them around something! If everyone pulls at the same time...”

I looked back at the other inmates and realised that plan wasn’t viable. Only a few of them were still on their feet. The others were huddled together in clusters, sharing what little body heat they could spare. More than a few lay on their own, barely moving.

They no longer had the strength to pull down their own barricade.

We were trapped.