Chapter Fourteen

 

 

SALVATION COMES AT a price, as Pastor Carbonara might have said.

For us, it came maybe ten minutes later.

I’d returned to the gymnasium, and ignored Copus as I wordlessly popped open one of the crates and found a tube of banana-flavoured food-paste. Unlike everyone else, I wouldn’t freeze to death, and I wasn’t going to starve myself just to keep them company.

“That’s not yours, inmate!” Copus said. “Drop it!”

“Get drokked,” I told him. “I’ve earned this.” I leaned back against the crate and looked down at Carbonara’s frozen corpse as I opened the tube. “So you just executed an unarmed prisoner who was already on her knees.”

“She took a run at me,” Copus said.

“She had a weapon,” I suggested. “Hidden in her hand. Her surrender was a ploy to gain your trust before she turned on you. Luckily, you spotted what she was doing at the last possible instant.” I popped out my voicebox and squeezed half the tube of food-paste into my throat.

“Right. A weapon.” He turned the gun over in his hands a few times, then returned it to his holster. “I had to do it, Rico. Otherwise...”

I replaced the voicebox and said, “Otherwise she’d eventually start again. Twist the facts and claim that she was the one who saved everyone. In a place like this, there’s always people willing to follow someone with confidence and a promise of a better life. They’re like the starving: eventually, they’ll eat dirt, because that’s the only way they can feel full.”

Copus started to nod, then stopped himself. “Hell no. Screw that. Philosophy is how people who can’t do things trick themselves into thinking they have something to offer. You get those barricades down?”

“No. No one has the strength... You could shoot out the window in the guard’s room.”

“And we’d all die sooner.” He slumped back against the stack of crates. “Drokk.”

I looked out through the gymnasium doors, then back to the body of the Pastor. Maybe she’d been the lucky one after all.

I glanced at Copus, and it seemed to me that he was thinking the same thing.

We waited to die.

Of course, we didn’t die. Not all of us.

I felt suddenly weak, far too heavy, and at the same time Copus slumped to the floor. Then the overhead lights flickered on.

Genoa had restored the power.

 

 

IN ALL, SINCE the morning of the explosion out in the gardens, eleven guards and forty-eight inmates died. Over a hundred had to be treated for minor injuries ranging from frostbite to blunt force trauma.

Eight days after it all began, I was summoned to Governor Dodge’s office, where he waited with sub-warden Copus. Both on the one side of the desk, the governor sitting and Copus standing at his shoulder. That was rarely a sign of good news.

I thought the Governor looked a little better than he had a few days earlier, when Kurya, Copus and I had freed him and the others. They’d locked themselves in Dodge’s office without nearly enough food and water, having seriously underestimated how long the siege—as Dodge kept calling it—would last.

When I’d failed to return to the bus, Kurya and Brennan had persuaded Sloane and Takenaga to let them investigate. As soon as they’d entered the prison, they heard the generator was offline, so that had been their first stop.

Apparently, Genoa had shot Brennan twice with the Kolibri replica, but the low-powered shots had barely slowed him down. He’d taken the gun and tossed it deep into the heart of the room. We never found it again—my guess it that it hit one of the magnetised parts of the generator and is still stuck there today.

But anyway.

Back in the office, the Governor was looking at me with distaste. He didn’t like that a prisoner had saved the day.

Dodge began, “If not for Southern Brennan...”

I raised my hands. “Whoa... What? All that drokker did was force Genoa—I mean, Lauren McRitchie—to reactivate the generator. I’m the one who broke the siege with Pastor Carbonara and her people. Single-handedly. Didn’t Giambalvo make that clear to you?”

“She did,” Copus said. “And we’re not denying your part, Dredd. But you’re the one who had the power shut down in the first place. You know how many inmates died of starvation in those few days? Zero. But we figure at least seven of them died from the cold.”

“If I hadn’t done it, more would have died in the long term. You know that.”

Governor Dodge suddenly looked deflated. “Gruddamn it... Taking into account the number of dead, the supplies your team found at Huygens, and the emergency supplies inbound from the station on Mimas, we have a chance. It’ll be tough as hell, but if we start the new gardens now, we might make it.” He chewed on his lower lip for a second, then glanced at Copus and nodded.

The sub-warden turned to me. “We’re putting you in charge of overseeing and maintaining the new gardens, Rico. This is a privileged position. You’ll have eighteen inmates working under you, following your orders. It shows a level of trust that, if broken—if we ever have even the slightest reason to believe it is broken—will result in the most severe punishments.”

“Do not let us down, Dredd,” the governor said.

I smiled, as well as I could with sewn-up lips. “Of course not. Thank you, Governor.”

He returned his attention to his desk and dismissed me with a brisk flick of his fingers.

Back out in the corridors, I passed Sven “Fawn” Svendsen attempting to mop the floor with only one functioning hand. He sported a thick bandage on the side of his head, and winced a little when he nodded at me. “Rico.”

“Sven.” I pointed to the floor. “Missed a bit.”

“I was saving that bit for later.” He rested on his mop for a second. “About what happened... Appreciate you not killing me. And sorry about almost killing you.”

He hadn’t even come close to killing me, but I let that slide. “Forget it,” I said. “Tensions were high. We were all on edge.”

“Sure, yeah,” he called after me. “Hey, life’s a lot better when we’re not carrying grudges, right?”

I didn’t respond to that, but I did give him a friendly wave. He was right. What happened, happened, and no amount of whining could make it un-happen.

The past is our foundation, sure, but it shouldn’t also be our cemetery.

As Elemeno Pea once told me, “You gotta let sleeping bygones bury the hatchet.”

That said...

Sometimes you have to go back. Not for yourself, but for those you’ve left behind. If someone does you wrong, and then you move on to something better, well, the only fair thing to do is to go back to that person who wronged you and show them the light.

It was 2089. I was almost halfway through my sentence.

I knew then that I was going to make it.