Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  The shuttle was swallowed by a landing bay, a row of lights guiding the craft in to the prison’s interior. An airlock bay closed around it as the atmosphere was normalized in swirling blooms of vapor, and then the next set of bay doors opened and the shuttle drifted inside and settled onto its landing pads as the engines whined down.

  Nathan unbuckled from his seat and stood to leave, but Foxx remained.

  ‘You’re not coming?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘This is your rodeo,’ she said with a smile. ‘Xavier’s your case, and if you want Forrester to hand you a detective’s shield then you’re going to have to lead this one yourself. Vasquez and I will head across to Titan with Betty and check out the leads on these stolen weapons. You and Allen here can talk to Xavier, if he’s still alive, and find out what happened to him down in San Diego.’

  Vasquez smiled cheerfully up at his partner, who winced.

  ‘How come I get the prison and this joker gets Polaris?’ Allen asked Foxx.

  ‘Experience,’ Foxx said, ‘Vasquez has history with the Marines so he’ll be of more use to me over there and besides, I want somebody reliable to keep an eye on Ironside. These places can get rough sometimes.’

  Vasquez’s smug smile suddenly dissolved into a hurt look. ‘You think I’m not reliable, that I can’t hold my own in there?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Foxx replied defensively as Allen tightened his collar and winked at Vasquez.

  ‘You head over to Polaris,’ he whispered amiably to his partner. ‘It’s the right thing to do. It’s safer there.’

  Vasquez offered a dirty look to his partner but said nothing as Nathan turned and walked with Allen to the shuttle exit. They walked down the ramp, the first thing Nathan noting being the stench of oil and stale air, metal and a temperature that felt almost cold. Awaiting them at the bottom of the ramp was a giant of a man with a fearsome red beard who thrust a hand the size of a shovel at Nathan.

  ‘Detectives, welcome to Tethys. I’m Arkon Stone, the warden here. I’m told you wish to speak with a prisoner named Xavier Reed?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Nathan said. ‘We have a few questions for him.’

  The warden tilted his head from side to side and winced a little. ‘Reed may not be much up for talking right now.’

  Nathan feared the worst as Vasquez replied. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘He’s in the infirmary,’ the warden replied. ‘There was an altercation on the block, and Reed got involved in it.’

  ‘Can we see him?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Sure,’ the warden replied, ‘it’s this way.’

  The warden led them across the bay, and Nathan looked up to see ranks of metal fences high on gantries above them. Behind the fences stood men who watched them with dark gazes as they passed by. Nathan saw one of the men tilt his head back and then jerk it forward as a globule of phlegm arced out through the fences and plummeted down toward them.

  ‘Incoming from above,’ Nathan said.

  The warden side–stepped the spit with Nathan and Allen as it landed with a splat near their boots. The warden looked up at the gantry and in a deep voice that made Nathan flinch he roared an order to his guards.

  ‘C Block in lockdown right now until the perpetrator comes forward!’

  A chorus of whoops and laughter rained down from the gantry as heavily armed guards in black uniforms with light–shields and black sticks charged up the stairwells toward the block. Nathan saw the prisoners flee, some of them tossing debris at the guards before they vanished to cower in their cells as the guards thundered along the gantry, the cell doors slamming one by one.

  ‘My apologies,’ the warden rumbled. ‘The inmates here know little of what it means to be civilized, human or humane.’

  The warden led them into the prison proper, the corridors all lined with metal sheets that none the less looked aged and decrepit, paint faded and peeling, doors hanging from tired hinges that squealed with every movement. Massive pipes and cables ran along the ceilings, with sections of corridors separated by pressure hatches that Nathan figured had once been used to separate sections of the station in the event of fires or gas leaks. Now, they represented immoveable barriers to anybody other than the prison guards.

  At a security gate a Holosap awaited, a man with a neon blue glow who waved them through. It was normal procedure, as Nathan had discovered, to grant menial work to some Holosaps. For them time had a different essence, the Holosaps able to function on a sort of autopilot and yet more capable than fully automated cybernetic organisms. Nathan recalled that the Holosaps were the result of the work of a British scientist in London, way back when the world was in the grip of The Falling. Working on a last–ditch attempt to save humanity’s essence by recreating the brain after death in a computer, he had succeeded in creating human beings who lived beyond death and were of course immune to the biological plague that had ravaged mankind, as well as representing a means of maintaining government and structure in the event of the complete collapse of civilization.

  With the emergence of the technology, in the remaining cities of the world that were still standing and containing people, the leaders and the wealthy decided to pre–empt their own deaths and voluntarily switch to becoming Holosaps. In an astonishing act of euthanasia they cryo–froze their bodies, dying on purpose to be reanimated as Holosaps to wait out the plague. There were around thirty thousand Holosaps still in existence, mostly individuals who for one reason or another were unable to return to their bodies due to malfunctions in the cryo–stasis capsules or long–term damage to body tissues and organs.

  The warden led them through a long corridor with large hard–light windows that looked onto a food court where inmates were busily chowing down and paying little attention to the passing warden. Nathan could see them in their orange prison uniforms, faces down over their bowls of meagre gruel, shoulders rolling as they shovelled the muck eagerly into their faces either through hunger or a desire to get the meal over with.

  ‘We have over a thousand inmates here in the prison,’ the warden said as they walked, ‘ranging from mid–level security prisoners to lethal status. Killers, rapists, armed robbers; you name it, they all reside here. Most all lower–level convicts serve their time on the Moon.’

  Nathan blinked. ‘There’s a prison on the moon?’

  The warden cast Nathan a curious look over his shoulder as they walked. ‘What planet did you grow up on? The very first off–world prison was on the moon, and several of its wings still operate today. At the time it was considered the best place for most convicts as escape meant certain death, and psychologists reckoned that the sight of the Earth so far away was a considerable punishment in itself for their crimes. Time told the tale that crime on Earth was reduced by fifty per cent over five years after the prison opened its doors, so I guess they were onto something because every prison on Earth closed within a century.’

  ‘How many guards do you have controlling these prisoners?’ Allen asked the warden.

  ‘Forty,’ the warden replied.

  ‘That’s pretty steep odds if there’s a riot,’ Nathan noted.

  ‘Not so much,’ the warden replied without concern. ‘We have numerous automated defense systems that are routinely tested and improved, and we have ten Holosaps on the staff who can access any part of the prison at will no matter what the convicts do to try to stop them. There’s nowhere here to hide gentlemen, and nowhere to run even if a prisoner were to escape. We have a saying here for the newcomers: enjoy your stay, because staying is what you’ll be doing.’

  ‘Is that what you said to Xavier Reed?’

  ‘To all prisoners who arrive here,’ the warden rumbled. ‘What’s your interest in Reed? I saw the filework, he’s as guilty as they come.’

  ‘Filework isn’t everything,’ Nathan said quietly as they reached the heavily guarded and barred entrance to the infirmary.

  ‘It’s enough for us,’ the warden replied. ‘If a convict ends up h
ere there’s gotta be a damned good reason for it.’

  Nathan and Allen said nothing as the doors opened with a screech from an alarm, the guards standing aside to let the warden through. They walked through the pressure hatch and into a low pressure walkway, the doors closing behind them as they made their way through and then passed through another slimmer hatch into the infirmary proper.

  ‘Warden on the deck!’

  The security guard inside the infirmary shouted the words and the prisoners all sat up in their beds or snapped to a sort of attention, many of them too injured to do so effectively. Nathan saw many of them were convicts who had suffered the indignity of having bionic limbs removed, the stumps of legs and arms concealed beneath the dangling sleeves and pant legs of their prison uniforms.

  The warden prowled among them and they backed fearfully away, some of them climbing back onto their beds as though afraid of what would happen next. Nathan noted that there were no nurses present on the ward, only other convicts wearing identity badges that marked them out as people with medical experience.

  ‘Where’s Reed?’ Allen asked.

  The warden pointed to the back of the infirmary, where a man lay in silence on a bed, presumably too ill to stand.

  ‘You’ve got ten minutes,’ the warden informed them.

  ***

  XV

  Nathan walked past the warden and approached the bed, and already he could see that Xavier Reed was in bad shape. Although he did not appear to be incapacitated, his right eye was puffy and swollen with bruising and his lips were split by bloody scabs in several places. A medical convict raised his eyebrows in greeting to them as they approached.

  ‘He’s been sedated for the pain,’ the medic informed them. ‘He can’t talk much right now.’

  ‘What happened?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Same thing happens to all police who wind up here,’ the convict replied with a vague shrug as though Nathan were stupid.

  ‘How badly was he hurt?’

  The convict looked at Reed. ‘Broken femur, broken left foot, dislocated knee, concussion, two lost teeth, fractured skull. Not too bad really. The breaks are all fixed but they won’t heal fully for a few more hours, so he’s not goin’ anywhere. The concussion will take a little longer to wear off.’

  Nathan was constantly amazed at the advances medicine had taken in the four hundred years since he had last visited a doctor. Broken bones could be fused within minutes using replicators that sampled bone cells and then accelerated bone regeneration using a source of the patient’s stem cells, samples of which were kept on file in all hospitals within the colonies. Surgery was performed either remotely without invasive means or by nano–bots introduced directly into the patient’s bloodstream, tiny clouds of biodegradable machines swarming to quell infection and stem the spread of everything from cancer to neurological disease.

  Nathan eased himself alongside Reed. ‘How you holdin’ up?’

  First impressions counted a lot with Nathan, as they did every investigator. Sometimes you could just tell at first glance that somebody was either a fundamentally good or bad person. There were few truly cunning individuals that could dupe a decent cop.

  ‘Never better.’ Reed’s voice was thick with the swelling from the beating he’d received, but there was a glimmer of bleak humor in his eyes as he peered at Nathan. ‘Come to gloat?’

  ‘We came to help.’

  Reed rolled his one good eye and looked away. ‘Little on the late side for that.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ Allen pointed out.

  ‘Tell us what happened in San Diego,’ Nathan said.

  ‘You already know what happened in San Diego,’ Reed replied, anger now in his tone. ‘My colleague got shot and I’m strung up for it. I didn’t shoot him, he pulled on me first and then the shot came from behind me. I turned to see somebody duck back into the open window of a warehouse behind me, then everybody came rushing out and I got pinned down. Nobody would listen to me so the shooter got away and here I am.’

  Nathan could sense the dread and loathing in Reed’s last few words, the bitterness and disbelief that he was in one of the solar system’s most notorious jails and likely facing an unofficial death sentence for a crime that he did not commit.

  ‘We checked out the crime scene,’ Nathan explained, ‘and we noted a few inconsistencies in the police report from the time of the incident.’

  Reed rolled his head back and peered up at Nathan. ‘Such as?’

  ‘There’s trace evidence of micro–scorching on the panes of glass inside the warehouse, consistent with a nearby plasma shot,’ Nathan said.

  Reed appeared to take interest now and sat up a little higher on the bed. ‘The original crime scene analyst made no mention of that.’

  ‘Because they never searched for it,’ Allen explained. ‘Forty or so witnesses gave the same story, and it was so overwhelming that the uniforms didn’t take the search for a second gunman too seriously. They did a cursory search of the warehouse but found nothing of interest.’

  ‘I’m not on a hook,’ Reed growled back. ‘I didn’t shoot Ricard.’

  ‘None the less you’re in here and what we’ve got so far isn’t enough to bring suitable doubt of conviction to the eyes of the San Diego District Attorney,’ Nathan added. ‘Tell us what happened. Was there anybody else in the area, anybody that you saw before the incident, perhaps when you first walked outside or were in the bar beforehand?’

  Reed sank back onto his pillow and sighed, his eyes closed.

  ‘I was in the bar for an hour before Ricard got on my case. He’d been drinking, more than he ever had before.’

  ‘Did he normally drink?’ Nathan asked. ‘To excess I mean?’

  ‘Not so much,’ Reed replied. ‘It was out of character for him that’s for sure, but he’d had a tough few weeks so I’d heard.’

  ‘What was his angle on you?’ Allen asked. ‘Why’d he get in your face at all if you were partners?’

  ‘You got a partner?’ Reed asked, to a nod from Allen. ‘Then you know why. You live in each other’s pockets on duty for days or even weeks on end, and even the best buddies get tired of the sound of your voice after a while. Ricard kept complaining about something, I told him to get over it and it just kind of went from there.’

  ‘Can you remember what he was complaining about?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Money,’ Reed replied. ‘He wouldn’t shut up about how he owed two months’ rent, couldn’t get the money together and was about to be kicked out onto the street. I told him I couldn’t afford to bail him out but that he should quit whining into his beer and figure something out.’ Reed sighed. ‘He took real offence, so I apologized but he wouldn’t back off and started to get right in my face. I lost it too and said we should take it outside. Last thing I thought he would do is pull his piece on me.’

  Nathan frowned thoughtfully for a moment.

  ‘So he didn’t normally drink, things had come to a head at home for Ricard, he gets in your face about it and then suddenly he’s pulling his gun on you. And all of that’s out of character for this guy?’

  Reed nodded. ‘That’s what I never understood. Ricard was straight as an arrow, not really the violent type at all.’

  ‘And nobody saw him getting angry with you in the bar?’ Allen asked. ‘Witness statements don’t mention an altercation inside, only the shots fired outside.’

  ‘Ricard was holding it back in,’ Reed explained, ‘angry but not shouting. Most people didn’t even notice there was an issue until we went outside, and then it was over in seconds. Ricard was drunk and I didn’t know what he was going to do, then he reached for his weapon. I drew my pistol instinctively and I only pulled the trigger because I was convinced that Ricard wanted me dead, that I’d underestimated how desperate he’d become and that he was out of control. My shot fizzled and then Ricard was hit in the chest. The shot that killed him went right past my shoulder.’

  Nathan thought for a m
oment longer and glanced at Allen, who shrugged vaguely as though he didn’t much care for the story. Nathan pulled an electro–film from his jacket pocket and showed it to Reed, an image of Scheff on the film.

  ‘You ever see this guy before?’

  Reed peered at the image for a moment but then shook his head. ‘No, why?’

  Nathan put the card back in his pocket and leaned closer to Reed.

  ‘Stay sharp in here and stay alive. I’m not going to let this case go, okay?’

  Reed peered at him suspiciously. ‘What do you care about it? I’m supposed to be a cop killer.’

  ‘Your wife and mother came to our precinct,’ Nathan said. ‘They convinced me that you might be telling me the truth, and now I’ve met you I agree with them.’

  Reed’s stony countenance quivered, like a rock face about to crumble and fall into the abyss, and his voice cracked with emotion.

  ‘You saw Erin?’

  Nathan nodded. ‘The beating you got, did it seem orchestrated, planned?’

  ‘They left the cell door open last night during a fire drill and put me in with Zak Volt,’ Reed snarled. ‘The warden would have had to allow that.’

  Nathan nodded, a picture forming now in his mind of what was happening.

  ‘Yesterday on New Washington I was involved in a shoot–out where the identity of the shooter who hit a cop in the line of duty was real clear. Except that it wasn’t, and the perp’ we arrested claimed that the shot came from behind him.’

  Reed gasped, almost sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Same MO.’

  ‘Same,’ Nathan agreed. ‘If this guy Scheff pulled a stunt like this off once he’d be likely to try it again, but right now he’s not singing for us so we don’t have a name and he alibied out for Ricard’s homicide. Stay firm, you understand?’

  Reed nodded, fresh vigor in his eyes now. ‘You got it.’

  Nathan turned with Allen and walked away from the bed.

  ‘You really buying this?’ Allen asked.