My many thanks to you, wise and wonderful reviewers! For your reward, here is next chapter!


Chapter 6

"You have got to take the upper hand in all situations or people, whether they're dead or alive, will walk all over you."

From Beetlejuice


Gerentex shifted until he was lying on his side. Uncomfortable. He rolled over onto his stomach. Suffocating. He lay on his back and scowled at the ceiling. Back when he was a messiah, he had slept on soft cotton sheets with silk blankets and pillows. Now he was reduced to this. Of course, he had been a prisoner many times before, but this was just humiliating. He had finally made it onto the Andromeda and now he was being locked up like an animal. True, his surroundings were a lot more comfortable than what he had previously experienced, but after losing about sixty faithful followers he was entitled to a little sulking.

He needed someone to blame. Naturally, he blamed Harper.

After all, the annoying little runt had provoked him to the point where he had had no choice other than to kill him, as he had threatened to do so many times before. If it weren't for the boy's stupid little comments then maybe he'd still be alive, and Gerentex wouldn't have had revenge wreaked on him by the angry crew. That big stupid Nietzschean had nearly twisted his arm off. That would leave a mark, maybe even a long-term injury. Stupid crew. Stupid Harper. Stupid Andromeda.

This was disgraceful; he was sure these cold, damp surroundings were making him ill. He was starting to feel a little light-headed. In fact, he felt light everywhere, it seemed that he was losing weight rapidly. At first it was just a little strange. Then his back stopped touching the bunk, and Gerentex panicked.

The Nightsider screamed and thrashed, kicking blankets in every direction. Someone had activated the anti-gravity, and he was floating, weightless in mid-air and still rising. One of his windmilling arms struck the ceiling and he screamed in fear, his voice absurdly high and squeaky. He was stuck on the ceiling now, and he was feeling extremely sick. He started begging every God he had ever heard of, including the one that he had invented, to make it stop. Whether because of his prayers or not, it stopped.

Gerentex crashed to the ground and cowered in a corner trembling.


Rommie frowned slightly. 'Dylan…' she said, in a voice that suggested there was a lot more to come.

'What is it, Rommie?' the captain looked up wearily from a star-chart. He had also been deeply affected by Harper's death, burying himself in his work. As a result, he looked exhausted.

'Someone is manipulating my main life-support controls on the lower decks,' she said, then raised an eyebrow. 'In the cell where Gerentex is being held.'

'What?' he demanded, standing up so fast that his chair fell over. 'Who?'

'I can't tell. Whoever it is has blinded my sensors very effectively in that particular control centre. I can't see anything or override it.' She paused. 'First the artificial gravity went, now the temperature is starting to drop.'


Gerentex shivered violently, his breaths clearly visible. Frost was starting to form on the walls, cold air rushing in from a vent. Nightsiders were naturally thick-skinned, but even he couldn't survive in these conditions for long. Every single muscle in his body was tensed up against the cold. Why wasn't someone helping him? Unless this was their intention: to save him a stabbing from Beka only to leave his blood to freeze in his veins. What had she said about his heart being a lump of stone? It soon would be if this didn't stop. Maybe it was Beka doing this, or that stupid android that had driven his followers away. He closed his eyes and waited for it to stop.

Then it did. The cold air stopped rushing in. The cell was finally starting to warm up, and Gerentex gave a little cry of relief as his blood stopped freezing and his muscles slowly relaxed in reaction to the warmth. Finally it reached room temperature, but it didn't stop there.

First he was just a little uncomfortable. Then he started to sweat, the sticky droplets gluing his clothes to his skin, and he swiped a hand across his forehead. It was still getting hotter, now it was like a warm summer's day on Earth, and getting hotter. The room was starting to turn into a furnace, now sweat was literally pouring off of him and he moaned, realising that this was to be the method of his demise: boiled like a rabbit in a pot.


'Temperature still rising…' Rommie said, with urgency in her voice. Dylan was pacing back and forth, biting his nails.

'Can't you see who's doing it?' he snapped finally. 'Can't you even see where this is coming from?'

'Dylan, right now it could just be a malfunction, or it could be deliberate. There are so many firewalls up that it will take me at least five minutes to break through.' In Rommie-time this was abnormally slow.

'In five minutes Gerentex will be dead,' he retorted, not bothering to add that he wouldn't shed any tears over their prisoner's body.

'I'm doing my best!' she said, not angrily, but like she was talking to an impatient child. Then she frowned. 'Dylan… the temperature's dropping again.' Another pause, then she relaxed. 'It's stopped at normal temperature.' She was glad that her failure to take complete control of such a simple system had not lead to a fatality, but she wasn't jumping for joy that Gerentex was still alive.


Gerentex let his breath out in a relieved rush. He stank from sweat, his skin felt like it had been dipped in lava and he was scared out of his wits, but he was alive. He swore, then burst into peals of relieved laughter, on the point of hysteria. He stood up, trying to control his shaking legs, then turned around. His mouth dropped open.

Unlike cooling the room, heating it was done by heating up the walls. Heat them up enough and they would start to change colour as a kind of warning. Normally, the walls would all be heated at the same time, so that if any colour change occurred, it would be the same all over, only this time that had not happened.

On the wall that Gerentex was now facing, the wall had been carefully heated in certain places to create sloppy, crude but still legible writing across it. His eyes scanned the six letters with open horror, the reflection of the blood-red writing in his wide eyes. He staggered backwards, landed on his butt and cracked his head against the wall, knocking himself out cold. His eyes slid closed, and he could no longer see the otherworldly message, the message that read:

ROUND TWO TO ME RAT FACE