The Bad Week!
He didn’t need to ask her what she meant by the term. “As well as we could. We managed to get all but one of the surviving domes under lockdown, but the mutineers in Bloch Dome had somehow managed to disable the HVAC control, so we had to go in and stun them by hand. That was Hell.”
By now the memory didn’t suddenly flash into his brain. It ambled in, almost comfortably: They were still in the life-support tubes when the mutineers stumbled upon them. Tobias’s team had been offered no quarter by their foes, and it was all that Tobias could do to keep his troops from responding in kind. He’d had to stun one of his own team to keep her from strangling a stringy-haired maniac after they’d finally dragged him off the soldier he’d been disemboweling with a rusty saw.
“Stunners? You were lucky, Commander. We had no stunners, no pacification gas after the first week — the fool that Bruno replaced saw to that! — and not enough hibernation drugs. But when our rebels had been taken? Oh, we had knives. Such a helpful crowd control measure, knives. Cheap, simple, no power, no moving parts. Just an edge and a throat.”
Reithner’s eyes may have been open, but they were looking at nothing in the room. “They cycled us all through crowd control at first, you know. And we all did it. Even Bruno took a turn, slicing the throats of those too violent and insane to trust. But you could tell right away who among us hated it, and who did not. The ones who did not somehow found themselves on the rotation more often. They even volunteered! And we did not forbid them.”