Nathan glimpsed the face of a burning mattress advancing vertically through the corridor and then saw others stacked behind it, burning furiously where the plasma shots of the guards’ weapons had set them alight. Behind the makeshift shield he saw ranks of inmates advancing through a corridor that was now darkened but for the shimmering flames and boiling smoke, their cries and shouts echoing back and forth as though they were marching out of hell itself with a fire breathing dragon at their head.
The mattress began to move more quickly as the cons caught sight of the landing bay and then with a coalesced wail of riotous glee they abandoned all caution and charged out of the corridor, the billowing flames of the mattress propelled ahead of them as they spilled in a dirty, smoke coiled flood into the landing bay. Nathan could see among them desperate faces, the faces of men forced at knife and gunpoint out into the firing line.
‘Open fire!’
The warden’s cry was audible even above the hellish screams of the berserk prisoners as they plunged toward the arc of the guards’ weapons, blades flashing in the low light and flaming torches crackling as they rushed forward while pushing terrified inmates ahead of them, more of Volt’s crew following and armed with plasma rifles.
Nathan winced as a deafening barrage of plasma fire ripped into the solid wall of men and muscle charging toward them. The shots tore into the crowd and the cheers of victory from deep within the sally port was overwhelmed grotesquely by cries of agony as the men at the front were cut down by volley after volley of plasma fire, their bodies twisting this way and that as they fell, other inmates tumbling over their writhing bodies only to be trampled by those following blindly behind.
Nathan saw one of the bearded thugs that had stood so loyally behind Zak Volt break free from the chaotic crowd and blunder forward, one thick bar in his chunky hand and his prison scrip uniform splattered with blood both stale and fresh. He rushed upon Nathan, screaming in some unintelligible language as he raised the bar over his head.
Nathan leaped forward and rammed his plasma baton into the con’s bearded face in a splash of superheated plasma and set it aflame. The bar fell from the big man’s grasp and his scream was silenced as his hands clawed at his burning face and he shook from side to side, still standing on big, thick legs. Nathan jabbed the baton again and this time the charge burned into the center of the man’s chest and burrowed deep to sear the flesh of his heart. The huge man’s thrashing stopped as his arms flopped by his sides and he plunged over backwards, leaving a trail of smoke from his ruined face as he slammed down onto the growing pile of corpses littering the landing bay.
A scream to Nathan’s right alerted him and he saw one of the guards overrun by prisoners, the cons smashing into the screaming officer like a human wave. The guard’s plasma rifle fired wildly into the air, smashing into one of the con’s arms and severing it in a bright flare of burning flesh and acrid smoke as the other cons swamped the guard and one of them stomped brutally down on his face.
Nathan turned as he heard the warden’s voice bellow a command. ‘Fall back by sections!’
To his amazement he saw that the sally port to C Block had opened, ranks of nervous cons lining the corridor within as Arkon Stone’s men began turning and retreating toward the safety of the sally port.
‘Fall back, now!’
The warden’s bellowed order soared above the chaos of the battle and Nathan grabbed the fallen enforcer’s plasma rifle, aimed and fired at another raging con. The shot hit him in the midriff, the inmate folding over his burning flesh and dropping his makeshift weapon as he sank to his knees.
‘There’s too many!’ Allen yelled.
‘Hold the line!’ the warden roared, firing as he did so and severing the leg of an armed man swaggering toward him, drunk on prison alcohol fermented in a sock from old bread and potatoes. The plasma blast passed through bone and flesh and Nathan saw the man shudder and sway briefly as the lower half of his left leg toppled over beneath him. The man seemed to stare blankly at the smoldering remains of his leg and then he laughed out loud, his eyes wild and unfeeling. Nathan switched his aim and fired, the shot piercing the crazed con’s chest and killing him instantly.
‘Ironside!’ Stone yelled. ‘Get over here!’
Nathan looked over his shoulder and saw the bay doors just a few yards behind him, and to his left the sally port to C Block. Cons were still swarming into the bay from other parts of the prison, hundreds of them, and there were only ten or twelve guards still standing in a defensive phalanx before Stone, all of them retreating back to C Block.
‘Ironside!’
Nathan’s heard Detective Allen’s warning and he saw Xavier stagger sideways, pain twisting his features. In front of him towered a con with a shaven head riven with scars and laced with purple tattoos, his fist wrapped around a jagged metal shiv, the other end of which was plunged deep into Xavier’s ribcage.
‘No!’
***
XXXIX
Nathan ran at the con and jammed the plasma rifle up against his face and fired. The big man roared in pain and twisted away from Nathan, his skin smoldering with blue smoke as the heat from the charge burned deep into his flesh. Xavier fell to his knees, both hands around the edge of the crooked blade embedded in his flesh as Nathan fired on the two nearest cons, both of them blasted backwards by the shots, their prison uniforms bursting into flame.
‘Stay with me, Xavier!’ Nathan yelled above the noise.
Nathan grabbed Xavier’s collar and began dragging him back toward C Block. Another con leaped forward and Nathan dropped Xavier and whirled as he swung the rifle in his grasp, the butt coming up and smacking the con under his jaw. The bone shattered like glass under the blow and the con’s eyes rolled up in their sockets as he flipped backwards and landed on the burning remains of his companions.
Two of the warden’s men rushed out and grabbed Xavier’s collar and dragged him away toward the sally port as their colleagues fired in support. Nathan turned and saw Xavier’s body being hauled into the sally port, and he turned to flee to the safety of Arkon Stone and his men.
‘Ironside!’
Nathan saw Allen hit in the chest with a metal pole by a shrieking, half–naked inmate smothered in blood. The detective staggered sideways and then tripped and fell onto the deck. The crazed inmate loomed over him, the pole raised above his head and murder in his eyes as Allen threw one useless arm up to block the metal bar.
Nathan aimed his rifle and pulled the trigger, but no plasma shot burst from the barrel. Nathan hurled the weapon aside and sprinted back into the landing bay, and with one hand he thrust the plasma stick out and slammed it into the inmate’s sweat–sheened chest. The weapon burned a blackened, smoking cavity in his chest as the inmate screamed and toppled backwards and slammed down onto his back.
Allen rolled onto his feet and backed up toward Nathan, who glanced over his shoulder and saw inmates swarming in front of C Block’s sally port, blocking their path as the warden and his men filtered into the safety within.
Nathan staggered in the darkness, the thick smoke in the landing bay and the effort of sustained fighting now choking the air out of him. His eyes blurred and he saw colored spots of light floating before the grotesque scene before him. Hundreds of cons scrambled over corpses as they struggled to reach the tiny band of officers still standing, smoke filling the air, the landing bay a blood red in the emergency lights. Flames twisted like demons from burning mattresses, from which more cons leaped into the landing bay with plasma weapons from the armory in their hands.
‘We’re cut off!’ Allen yelled as he fought off an inmate, swiping him across the temple with a plasma stick to the sound of a dull thump only to have two more men hurtle toward him, the three of them plunging onto the deck in a writhing mass of limbs striking frenzied blows.
Nathan grabbed the corner of his jacket and bent his head down, pushed the fabric over his face and sucked in air as deeply as he could as he rushed toward Allen. The lights and blurriness vanished and he came upright to see Zak Volt rush toward him through the smoke and leap over Allen and the two assailants.
Volt looked like something out of a horror movie, his nose encrusted with dried black blood plastered across his bloodied face, the hair on one side of his scalp burned off and trailing thin smoke from a plasma wound, his eyes wild and deranged, bloodthirsty for the mindless satisfaction of hate. He held a plasma pistol in one hand and a shiv in the other as he charged.
Zak lunged forward with a long, blood–smeared blade fashioned from a splinter of steel mirror and Nathan twisted aside, swung a left hook that connected with Zak’s temple. The con barely seemed to notice as he smashed his knee up into Nathan’s rifle and twisted it from Nathan’s grasp as he smashed his face directly into Nathan’s.
The force of the attack drove Nathan backwards and he slammed into the bay door, aware of the fighting going on around him as the remaining guards were pinned against the wall of the bay and forced to fight for their lives at close quarters. Zak screamed and swung the blade at Nathan, who raised his right arm and side–stepped to catch the blade before it could bite into his flesh.
He pivoted on one foot and with a heave of effort jerked his right knee up into the con’s ribcage. Volt grunted and Nathan felt brittle bones somewhere in the man’s chest crunch against his knee cap as he twisted over sideways, forcing Volt over with him in sympathy as Nathan slammed Volt against a wall and lifted his boot to smash it into the killer’s wrist, smashing the plasma pistol from his grasp.
Nathan swung wildly for the man’s head but Volt was too fast, ducking low as he leaped back up and a fist flashed into Nathan’s vision and smacked across his cheek. Nathan reeled away but before he could regain his balance the con slammed a boot into the inside of Nathan’s left knee. A lance of bright pain bolted up Nathan’s leg as he crashed down onto the deck.
Zak swivelled expertly on one foot, driving the other toward Nathan’s torso. The boot smashed into Nathan’s chest and hurled him onto his back as Volt looked in vain for the dropped plasma pistol and instead whipped a second, smaller glittering blade from his waistband and plunged down toward Nathan.
Nathan brought one leg up against his chest and pushed out, catching Volt with the blade a hair’s breadth from his throat. Throbs of pain pulsed though Nathan’s skull as he struggled against the weight and insane strength of his assailant. He thrust out with his leg, rolling the con off balance but Volt pushed harder, his teeth bared and white, his eyes wide with brutal delight, spittle flying. Volt’s insane grip was too strong for Nathan to break as he leaned all of his weight in and Nathan felt the tip of the blade pierce his throat with a bright pin–head of white pain.
Nathan cried out and then suddenly he felt a thud and he saw Volt’s eyes fly wide open in shock. The pain in Nathan’s throat vanished as the pressure disappeared, as though the life had been suddenly sucked from Volt’s body in a single breath. Nathan looked up to see Xavier Reed crouched in pain over Volt, the blade from his ribcage gone as he clasped the wound with both hands, blood seeping from between his fingers.
Nathan looked up at Volt and saw the jagged blade now poking up from between his ribs and his spine, buried deep in his body. Volt’s crazed, shocked expression collapsed into a bitter smile as blood seeped from his mouth and pooled on Nathan’s chest, the con’s spine severed and his body useless.
‘You’re still gonna die here,
stick
,’ he rasped.
Nathan heaved the con off of him, Volt’s useless body slumping onto the deck as Nathan clambered to his feet. He looked down at Volt.
‘You first.’
The fighting around them seemed to have increased in intensity as Nathan stood, his chest heaving from the exertion as he looked at Xavier and saw the former officer collapse once more down onto one knee, blood streaming copiously from the wound in his side. Nathan dashed to his side and saw that his face was pale and his lips were turning blue.
‘Stay with me, Reed,’ he insisted. ‘There’s still time.’
Xavier smiled, the kind of smile that Nathan knew came from people who had decided that their game was up and that fighting was no longer an option. Arkon Stone’s men were advancing again in an attempt to support Xavier, Allen and Nathan, but he could see that there were just too many armed convicts between them now and no way they could reach the sally port. The wound in Xavier’s side was deep and they had no access to the kind of medical help Nathan knew would be needed to fix him.
‘It’s a little late in the day for hope,’ Reed whispered.
A bellow roared across the landing bay that drowned out the fighting. ‘Stand down!’
Nathan looked to see Arkon Stone standing with his arms outstretched, a plasma rifle in each giant fist as he stared down the advancing hordes of prisoners. His deafening command had momentarily silenced them, and for a long moment two hundred or more prisoners stared at the dozen or so guards pinned against the landing bay doors.
Nathan could hear the crackling fires burning nearby, lighting the bay with their ghoulish glow. He felt briefly like an antelope surrounded by a pride of lions on a darkened savannah, bush fires all round preventing any hope of escape as the warden called across to the inmates from the safety of C Block’s sally port.
‘It’s over,’ the warden boomed. ‘If you stand down now then no further charges will be pressed against any of you. If you push on, if you harm us any further, then none of you will ever escape this place alive!’
Nathan looked at the crowd of inmates, and for the first time he knew for sure that the warden’s judgement was wrong. There could be no reasoning with these men, for the entire system was designed to take hope away from them. Far from home, in a prison from which there could never be any kind of escape, knowing that even if they did they would be blasted from existence by the CSS fleet stationed nearby, they would sooner die in glory than rot for decades, long forgotten by their families.