Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) (26 page)

‘There’s no way out and the power to the control room has been cut off,’ Xavier said. ‘We’re trapped.’

***

XXVII

Tethys Gaol

‘It’s perfect.’

Nathan’s voice was calm now as he stood beside the hard–light window in the watch tower and looked out over D Block. Zak Volt and his crew had taken control of the riot, his thugs patrolling the gantries with flickering blades in their chunky fists as they began organizing their uprising and putting into motion whatever deranged plan their leader had in mind.

‘What’s perfect?’ Xavier asked.

‘The timing,’ Nathan replied. ‘A riot, just when people want you dead. It’s the perfect way to kill you without having to pin the murder on any one convict. Inmates won’t snitch on each other, so your death will be chalked up to random violence.’

Xavier sighed and nodded. ‘You think that Volt’s a part of this whole thing? That he’s behind me being framed?’

‘No,’ Nathan cautioned. ‘I think that he’s being controlled by somebody else, that he’s the one tasked with killing you. He couldn’t have set you up for the shooting of Ricard in San Diego from all the way out here, but he must tie into all of this somehow.’

Xavier was sitting on the edge of the control panel and watching the gangs below, watching the violence with the morbid curiosity of the terminally doomed, the unthinkable acts going on inside the cells as the “sharks” exacted revenge on the “fish” for unspoken insults, perceived disrespect or spurned advances. Detective Allen leaned against the wall beside the window, clearly disturbed by their close proximity to the gang.

‘Any one of these animals could be behind it,’ Xavier replied. ‘I’m tired of thinking about the whole damned thing. Ever since Ricard started laying into me in San Diego I’ve been left wondering how this even all got started, why it all got started. I was a model prison officer, I had no enemies, no concerns and was just building a life for myself. Why the hell would somebody go to such lengths to set me up like this?’

Nathan thought about that for a moment and a new train of thought was sparked into life. The fact was that until his apparent shooting of Ricard, Xavier Reed was indeed the perfect officer. If Nathan had been wanting to set somebody else up for the murder of another officer, he would likely have chosen a patsy with issues in their past; official warnings, criminal history, reputation for anger issues or violence, that kind of thing. The last person he would have selected would have been an officer like Reed, which might have sparked suspicion had the planned murder not gone quite to….

Nathan stared into space for a moment as a sudden and unexpected realization slammed into his awareness like a freight train.

‘Planned,’ he whispered to himself.

‘What now?’ Allen asked.

‘Ricard’s murder,’ Nathan said. ‘It had to have been
planned,
intricately. I mean, we knew that, but when you think about it you had to be standing in exactly the right spot, at exactly the right time, for the real shooter to get a line of sight to you from that old warehouse in San Diego.’

‘But it was Ricard who was shot,’ Reed replied. ‘He was the victim.’

‘Maybe,’ Allen replied for Nathan. ‘Ironside here’s got it into his head that you may have been the target for Ricard, but that whoever promised to pay him off shot him instead.’

Reed stared at Nathan for a long beat. ‘That’s insane.’

‘Which is why it’s so effective,’ Nathan went on. ‘The real shooter kills Ricard, leaving you holding the can for the murder and with the only person who could prove your innocence dead in the gutter at your feet.’

Xavier stood up from the corner of the desk and for the first time his expression glowed with the light of hope.

‘That’s brilliant,’ he said, but the glow of hope faded suddenly. ‘But he’s dead, so there’s no way to prove any of this.’

‘Yes there is,’ Nathan insisted, ‘because like I said, for their plan to work they had to know precisely where you would be. None of this could have happened unless it was precisely choreographed, with the shooter already in position and Ricard able to confront you in just the right way for the shooter to fire and make it look like the shot had come from you.’

Xavier shook his head in wonder.

‘And my pistol? It fizzled, but nobody believed me.’

Allen shrugged.

‘It isn’t that tough to bleed the energy out of a plasma charge, Xavier. We need to figure out who knew precisely where you would be on that day in San Diego and also had access to your service weapon prior to the incident.’

Xavier’s eyes locked with Nathan’s, and then at the same time they both reached the same conclusion.

‘I know who set this all up,’ Nathan said.

‘So do I,’ Xavier uttered as though he were spitting something unpleasant from his mouth, and Nathan could see the raw pain on the man’s face as he suddenly was forced to come to terms with the knowledge of who had condemned him to a lifetime in prison. ‘It was…’

‘Ironside!!’

The call came from the block, the hard–light windows designed to allow sound to pass though unimpeded so that the sticks could keep both their eyes and ears on what was happening inside the block. Nathan walked across to the windows and looked down.

Zak Volt was standing on top of one of the tables nearest the watch tower, the hall around him filled with armed cons all staring up at Nathan. Behind them, the gantries were filled with cons all watching with interest, most of them with nothing left to lose having had Volt’s heavies empty their cells of anything valuable. Smoke curled in lazy coils across the ceiling of the block from the mattresses that were still smoldering high on the upper tier, blocked latrines still spilling languid sheets of water down the gantries as embers spiralling down from above completed the hellish scene.

‘Ironside,’ Volt repeated as he saw Nathan appear at the windows.

Volt’s face was still smeared with his own blood, and his clothes with the blood of other inmates unfortunate enough to have got in his way. His nose was splattered across his face where Nathan’s attack had crushed the cartilage, his eyes bloodshot and filled with poisonous fury.

‘You’re finished, Volt,’ Nathan called back. ‘There’s nowhere else you can take your violence and hate.’

Volt smiled, no warmth within, like a shark baring its teeth before the bite.

‘I have this block and everybody in it, and before long I’ll have the whole prison.’

‘To do what?’ Nathan replied, hoping to sew doubt among Volt’s followers. ‘Get blasted to hell by the fleet? There’s nowhere to go. You could control every inch of this entire prison and it would get you nowhere, you idiot!’

Rage flashed brighter across Volt’s face and he stepped closer to the tower, a shiv in his left hand and what looked like a blade fashioned from a portion of hacked steel mirror in the other.

‘Yo’ talk to me like that while you’re up there, Ironside, but everythin’ you say’s gonna come back to you on the edge of my blades!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Nathan replied. ‘None of this matters. All any of you are doing is doubling your sentences by following this jerk into oblivion, and for what? For ten minutes of flames and watching latrine water being flushed down on you?’

Nathan saw the crowd of inmates looking around at the shattered block as though they were suddenly coming awake from a bad dream. Volt’s smile returned, more cold and brutal than before.

‘You think that they care?’ he challenged. ‘We’s all here for life, for one reason or th’other. How long our sentences are don’t matter to us, ‘cause you can’t get more than life unless you’re one of those damned Holosap freaks!’

Ripples and murmurs of agreement rippled through the crowd, but Nathan shook his head.

‘Those Holosap freaks don’t have to spend their lives cooped up in this stinking hole with people like you,’ he pointed out. ‘They get to live more than one life in complete freedom out there. That’s something people like you will never have again, Volt. You’re done, no matter how many people you kill in here.’

‘Well now, that ain’t quite the truth,’ Volt replied, ‘because we ain’t stayin’ in here no longer, right boys?’

A cheer went up from the cons once again Volt’s men and swallowing whatever deranged and insane plan he had devised. Nathan knew that he must have lied to them somehow to get them to follow him in a riot on a space station prison from which they could not hope to escape.

‘What crap did you feed those boys of yours to convince them to follow you on your suicidal little riot, Volt?’

‘None at all,’ Volt snapped, and then from below the watch tower Nathan saw Volt’s two bearded thugs drag a captured prison officer out into view. ‘Y’see, if we don’t get what we want, we’ll start executin’ these folks one after th’other.’

Nathan saw the guard’s battered face, his uniform ripped and torn and bloodied, his legs weak with fear and loathing. Volt crouched down alongside the prostrate guard and looked up at Nathan as he held the edge of the steel mirror to the man’s throat.

‘So, how ‘bout it, Ironside?’

‘What do you want to know?’ Xavier said as he stood forward, his eyes fixed on the captured guard. ‘You don’t need to hurt him.’

‘The armory,’ Volt snapped. ‘You can open it from up there! We want the weapons, and we want a shuttle out of Tethys in one hour!’

Xavier looked pleadingly at Nathan, but it was Allen who answered. ‘You know that he’ll kill the guard anyway, and us, whether you do what he wants or not.’

‘I can’t let him murder that officer,’ Xavier whispered. ‘I can’t stand by and let him do that.’

‘You can’t stop him either,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘No matter what you say, Volt will kill him.’

Xavier bit his lip, his features twisted with anguish as he looked down and saw the guard trying to squirm away from the jagged blade.

‘I’m runnin’ out of patience!’ Volt yelled.

The mirror’s saw–tooth edge pressed against the guard’s throat and he let out a cry of pain as it bit into his flesh, blood smearing the surface.

‘Level Four!’ Xavier shouted, his voice poisoned with regret as he hit a switch in the Watch Tower and a series of red lights turned green. ‘But we can’t get out of the tower to request a shuttle.’

Volt grinned as he stood up from the guard. ‘We jus’ gonna follow you, blast our way out of that watch tower and then take every block fo’ ourselves. We got hundreds of hostages in here!’

Nathan frowned, and then he saw the escape line that Xavier had made drop from the vent high above them on the watchtower and swing away from them in a graceful arc. Nathan stepped closer to the window and saw cons on the upper tier with a makeshift hook constructed from thin strips of plastic protruding out across the block.

The line swung smoothly up to the far gantry, where it was caught by some of Volt’s men.

‘Y’all got room in there for some more,
stick
?’ Volt called in glee.

‘The tower’s sealed!’ Nathan called back. ‘There’s no way out of here!’

‘There is if we got currency!’ Volt sneered as he pointed to the guard lying at his feet.

‘They’re coming in,’ Xavier said.

Nathan called down to Volt. ‘Let the guard go! That was the deal!’

Ryan looked down at the stricken man and then he lifted one boot and smashed it down feverishly on the guard’s skull with sickening cracks that seemed to echo around the block. The guard’s skull shattered and several of the watching cons jerked away from the scene as one vomited. The guard’s body fell limp, sprawled across the tiled deck amid a pool of rapidly spilling blood as his dying heart continued to pump inside his chest. Volt looked up at Nathan and chuckled maniacally.

‘He’s gone alright!’

Grim laughter rippled across the block as Xavier turned from the window, one hand over his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut.

Nathan saw Volt’s bearded henchmen clamber up onto the railings and then one of them launched himself into the air. The thug’s massive form swung across the block to a wave of cheers and then he vanished above the watchtower windows.

Nathan heard a deep thump and then the bearded thug plummeted past the window, his swing too low for the hatch. Gusts of laughter bellowed out from the crowd as they scattered to avoid the grisly missile, and the bearded man’s body crashed down onto tables to the sound of splintering bones and a roaring cry of agony.

‘They’ll figure it out soon enough,’ Xavier said, his features pale and his skin sheened with sweat.

‘We gotta make a stand here, now, and hold them off,’ Allen said. ‘It’s the only play we got left.’

Nathan looked at Allen. ‘I’m sorry, for getting’ you into this.’

Allen nodded. ‘You can apologize when we get out of here. You got any ideas about how we’re gonna survive long enough?’

Nathan looked around and saw a rack filled with plasma sticks. He hurried across and grabbed one as he heard another body slam against the wall outside, this time accompanied by cheers of delight and no splintering bones.

Above them he heard the sound of somebody slithering into the ventilation ducts above the control room, and he threw a plasma stick to Xavier.

‘One thrust as they come through,’ he said, ‘then a blow to the head to silence them and save the charge, okay?’

Xavier nodded, and then suddenly the grill in the ceiling clattered down to the ground and a hulking con thrust his way out of the opening feet first and dropped into the control room.

***

XXVIII

CSS Titan

Kaylin Foxx watched as Doctor Schmidt stood in the quarantine cubicle and examined the floor upon which he “stood”. His projection, which was controlled by computers to match whichever of Titan’s many decks he appeared upon, was immune to any kind of biological interference, making him the ideal candidate to examine at close range the bizarre creature now occupying the cubicle. Beyond the translucent walls of the quarantine unit, four Marines stood guard and watched in silence, Lieutenant Foxx, Betty and Vasquez alongside them.

‘What do you make of it?’ Vasquez asked.