Read Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer for Free Online

ride it all the way along! Though they’re bastards, you got to admire their cleverness!’
    ‘I don’t like to think there’s nothing we can do,’ said Davide, darkly.
    ‘Come—’ said Mo. He was near enough to Davide to be able to reach out and slap his flank. ‘Don’t fight it! You’ll only fret yourself to pieces. Eleven years
isn’t so long. We have food now, we can keep busy, with the drills. Before you know it we’ll be free.’
    But Davide shook his head. ‘You want to make yourself into a drone, you go ahead. I refuse to accept that they got me beat. There has to be a way out of this cell.’
    ‘For instance?’ asked Lwon.
    Everybody looked at Davide. He blushed, his dark skin going a red-granite colour. ‘Agents of folly,’ he said, turning his eyes to the wall. ‘All of you.’
    ‘Drill through to the outside,’ said E-d-C, grinning, ‘take a deep breath, and jump through? Is that it?’ It wasn’t so very funny, but it made Marit and Mo
laugh, and Gordius followed a few beats later. ‘A real deep breath?’ E-d-C pressed. ‘Jump all the way back to Earth?’
    ‘Bit of re-entry heat,’ Marit put in. ‘Warm us nicely.’ They were all shivering.
    Davide, finally, was goaded into replying. ‘There’s no way off without a ship, sure’ he said. ‘But who says the first ship that comes by has to belong to the
Gongsi?’
    ‘So you’re going to signal a ship?’ asked Lwon, his voice level and serious. ‘You have a transmitter somewhere secreted about you, do you?’
    Davide stared furiously at him. ‘Or even if the first ship that comes along is the Gongsi retrieval vessel,’ he said, shortly. ‘Even if we do have to wait eleven
years – why should we just troop aboard meekly and go back to 8Flora? Eh? Why not take the ship?’
    ‘Take it . . . how?’ Lwon gave the impression of somebody who genuinely wanted to know.
    ‘There’s metal in this rock,’ said Davide, turning his eyes to the wall again. ‘There must be. Why not extract it, and make weapons from it? Then when the Gongsi team
land to collect us – bam! We take them and their ship.’
    Nobody spoke for a while, until Lwon did. ‘A plan,’ he conceded. ‘But there are at least three-bit problems with it. How do we turn this ore into metal? Smelt it?’
    ‘Smelt it,’ repeated Davide, perhaps agreeing with Lwon, or maybe blankly questioning his words by repeating them.
    ‘We were wondering why the fusion cell has its threshold set so low – yeah? Wouldn’t it be nice to warm this place up more than we’re managing – yeah? Well
maybe this is why the Gongsi has set it up the way they have. If they gave us unlimited heat that’s precisely the sort of thing we’d be doing: smelting, forging big-old swords, making
ourselves troublesome for the retrieval crew.’ He shook his head. Dust came off his beard and swirled slowly through the air both sides of his face. ‘They’re ahead of us
there.’
    ‘There has to be something we can do,’ insisted Davide.
    Jac spoke up. ‘Metal may be beyond us. But what about glass?’
    ‘Hah!’ said E-d-C. ‘This again? You still want windows , Leggy?’
    ‘It’s just that I’ve noticed, during my shifts on the digger,’ Jac said, ‘when I’m digging through silicates – I’ve noticed that I get beads of
glass. They’re thrown off by the friction, I guess. Well, mightn’t there be a way of . . .’
    ‘You know the difference between ingenious and clever , Leggy?’ Davide broke in. ‘Maybe you’re the first but you surely aren’t the second. Think it through . What good are glass beads? If we can’t generate the heat to smelt metal, how can we generate the heat to work glass? And if we made a window – how could we fit it into
the side of the stroid? How, exactly, would we cut out a window frame without losing all our air? And even if we could? Say we’re talking about a piece a metre wide – sand-glass would
be so full of impurities it’d