Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  “I know,” I told him as I grabbed the key from his hand and ran for the airlock. After one hundred seconds the key would become inert again. It was a security measure, in case a prisoner ever managed to snatch a key from a guard. “Keep the airlock open!”

  Outside, the wind threatened to lift me off my feet as I half-ran, half-crawled toward the downed prisoner. I tried shouting, letting the fallen man know that help was coming, but my voice was swamped in the roar of the storm.

  The ground was treacherous, slick with fragmented hailstones as a fresh flurry pounded down around me, ripping chunks out of the dirt.

  As I reached the bodies, a hailstone the size of a football missed my head by centimetres. Later, Pea told me that they had watched it strike the ground behind me and bounce clear over the bus.

  I saw a gloved hand protruding from beneath the bodies, and grabbed it. It grabbed back—he was still alive.

  I took hold of the topmost body—it was a prisoner I’d seen working in the gardens—and dragged it clear, then lost a few seconds trying to get the key to work.

  It was only when I was hauling the man free that I realised it wasn’t a man at all, but Adelaide Montenegro, my fellow former Judge.

  She nodded at me as I helped her to her feet, then she began to scramble over the growing piles of hailstones toward the bus.

  I followed her, aware that at any moment we could be struck from behind.

  By the time we reached the bus, the hail was already up to the airlock’s outer door. Forbes was inside, kicking out the hail almost as fast as it was piling up.

  Montenegro lunged for the airlock, and Forbes grabbed her hand, helped her the rest of the way. Then he reached out for me.

  I almost hesitated. I didn’t want someone like Forbes to have any reason to think I owed him, even in a situation like this.

  But then, I had just saved his colleague’s life.

  I grabbed his arm and allowed him to help me into the airlock.

  He slammed the outer doors closed, and the roar from outside subsided a little.

  As we left the airlock, Siebert was waiting for us. “I’ve heard of storms like this lasting hours. Then we’re looking at digging the damn bus out.”

  Forbes said, “Well, now, thanks to Rico, we have one more person to dig.”

  “Right,” Siebert said. He held out his hand, palm up. “Key?”

  I pointed outside. “I had more important things on my mind than your stupid key. You want it, go out and fetch it for yourself.”

  Naturally, Siebert ordered the other guards to search me, but it wasn’t hard to hide the key in the folds of my environment suit when I removed it.

  The storm lasted for nine hours, a relentless, deafening assault that shook the bus with every impact and more than once threatened to shatter a window.

  I eventually fell into an uneasy sleep and woke to a darkened bus, thinking that night had come; but no, this was Titan. Night was another six days away. We were just buried under countless tonnes of hail.

  Siebert and another of the guards—a thin, stoic man called Vickers—were awake, sitting in the cab. When Siebert saw me move, he beckoned me closer.

  In a low voice, he said, “Rico... The engine’s dead. Don’t know whether it’s just a loose connection or something more serious, but”—he tapped the dashboard readouts—“there’s nothing happening here. Radio’s shot, too. Copus knows where we are, but we don’t know how badly they were hit by the storm. It could be some time before we’re rescued.”

  “So we rescue ourselves,” I said. “Dig our way out.”

  “And go where?” Vickers asked. “We’re hundreds of kilometres from the prison and we’re the only people on the whole damn planet.”

  Siebert said, “It’s a moon, not a planet.”

  “Like that makes a drokkin’ difference.”

  “We’re not alone,” I said. “But right now, getting out of here is our first priority. Even if Copus sends people after us, we don’t know how deep we’re buried. From the air, they might not spot us. We might never be found.” I tilted my head back, looked up at the roof. “How thick is the armour plating on this thing?”

  “Three centimetres, maybe four,” Siebert said. “We don’t have anything that can cut through it. And we can’t go out through the airlock. There’s a wall of ice out there, and all the digging tools are outside. I say we sit tight.”

  Vickers nodded. “Food’ll last us a couple of weeks. Three if we’re careful. Same with the air, plus there’s oxygen in the suits. And if we want water, we have all the ice we’ll ever need outside.”

  “The ice isn’t water, it’s frozen methane,” said Guildford, coming up behind me. “Though it might come in useful if there’s no sign of rescue and we’re slowly starving to death. We could thaw some out and gas ourselves instead.”

  “Methane gas is flammable in oxygen,” I said, thinking aloud.

  Siebert said, “You think we could burn our way out?”

  I started to say that it might work, but Guildford interrupted me. “Unlikely. If the mix of oxygen to methane is too thick or too thin, it won’t burn. A bigger problem is that if the ice is methane, it won’t be around long. It’s got a much lower melting-point than frozen water. That’s not as good as it sounds: if it melts too quickly there’s a possibility we could drown. I doubt this bus was built to float.”

  THE BUS’S BACK-UP power failed on the evening of the second day. That is, the second Earth day.

  Most of us were awake when the interior lights dimmed and faded. The darkness wasn’t complete—it was still daytime on Titan, and enough light filtered through the hail outside that we could still just about see.

  “Damn, it’s quiet out there,” Vickers said.

  He was right. There was the constant dripping of melting methane-ice, but that only served to heighten the silence. There was no wind, no engine-hum of an approaching rescue craft... And something else was missing. It took me a moment to realise what it was. “It’s quiet in here, too. The air-recycler must be on the same circuits as the lights.”

  Pea jumped to his feet. “Drokk! How long is the air in here going to last?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Donny Guildford said. “You’ll freeze to death before you suffocate.”

  Siebert said, “Everyone, suit-up. And if any of you have any ideas how we can get out of here, now’s the time to let the rest of us know.”

  Guildford said, “Bet you all wish you’d had the treatment now, right?”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t help,” I told him, pulling on my environment suit. “The first thing we need to establish is how deep we’re buried. I say we have no option but to start digging. We open the outer airlock door and see what happens. If the hail spills in, then it’s not all frozen into one mass. That means we’ll have a chance of getting out.”

  Siebert nodded. “All right. But we’re only sending out one person. And that’s Montenegro.”

  The former Judge looked up at him. “Me? No way.”

  “You’re the smallest. That means you won’t have to dig so much.”

  Guildford said, “It’s not about size, Siebert. It’s about strength. And one isn’t enough. Me and Rico will do it.”

  There were no objections, not even when I took the oxygen tank from one of the spare suits.

  Without power, we had to open the airlock doors manually, which took some effort. The guards closed and sealed the inner airlock door behind us, then Guildford and I stood facing the outer door.

  “Ready for this?” he asked.

  “Don’t have a lot of other options.”

  We grabbed hold of the lever next to the door, and pulled. I had to brace my feet against the wall, but we managed it. The methane ice on the outer door cracked as the door swung in, revealing a densely-packed wall of apple-sized hailstones. They didn’t fall.

  “That’s not good,” Guildford said. He reached out and poked at the wall with his fingertips, hesitated a second, then p
ressed harder. “Seems solid... although it’s melting.”

  Together, we tried pushing at the wall, then kicking at it. Too solid to move, and too slick to hold onto.

  Guildford said, “Rico, we could be looking at two or three metres. Maybe more. Nothing short of a concussion grenade is going to get us through this. We’re going to have to wait until it melts further.”

  “That might not be as long as you think,” I said. “Look down.”

  He looked. At our feet was a pool of liquid methane about a centimetre deep, and growing. “Damn. That a good sign or a bad one?”

  “Wish I knew. Could be that it’s melting from the ground up rather than from the top. If that’s the case, then—” We felt the bus shift, very slightly, to the left.

  Guildford said, “Okay... That’s definitely not a good sign.”

  The bus lurched again, more noticeably.

  “I know we’re not parked on a hill,” he said. “So what in Grud’s name is happening out there?”

  We never found out exactly what happened. The best guess is that the bus was frozen into the ice, and the ice was melting under it.

  The bus rocked and swayed for another four hours. At times, we had no doubt that we were moving, that the whole ice floe was sliding, dragging the bus with it.

  Many of the more serious lurches—the ones that had us clutching at walls and seat-backs for support—were accompanied by deafening cracks from outside.

  The walls trembled as the bus’s wheels were dragged over the ground, and there was nothing we could do but wait it out.

  The air inside the bus grew stale, our breath misting as the temperature dropped. Frost formed on the inside of the windows, and we were forced to seal our helmets and pray that the oxygen lasted long enough for us to be rescued.

  Except for Guildford, of course.

  I saw Vickers and Siebert at the bus’s controls. They had the dashboard panels removed, and had been poring over the wiring for hours, to no great effect.

  I sat with Pea and Montenegro and Forbes and Guildford, and countless ideas were raised, discussed and dismissed. Except for Pea’s ideas, which were dismissed without discussion to save time.

  And gradually I became aware that Vickers kept looking in our direction, and of the air of conspiracy about him and Siebert. You quickly develop a feel for that sort of thing when you’re a Judge.

  Montenegro seemed to be aware of it too; she moved closer to me and said, “Something’s wrong.”

  “I know,” I told her, keeping my voice low. “We should have been found by now, no matter how far the ice has carried us. I think we need some answers.” I stood up, stepped over sleeping bodies on my way to the cab.

  “That’s close enough, Rico,” Siebert said, his hand drifting toward his gun. “What do you want?”

  “Why haven’t they come for us?”

  Vickers said, “We talked about that. The bus’s controls are shot; they can’t lock—”

  “Drokk the controls,” I said. “Every prisoner on this bus has a GPS tracking implant. You know that.”

  The two men briefly exchanged a glance, and my suspicions were confirmed. There was no GPS implant. It was just another ruse to keep the prisoners in line.

  And I was sure that even if we were rescued, sub-warden Copus would have us killed before we could let the other prisoners know that the GPS wasn’t real. I gave them a way out. “It doesn’t work this far from the prison, does it?”

  “Radius of about ninety kilometres,” Vickers said. Lying.

  Siebert added, “And if you even think of mentioning that to the others, I’ll happily put a bullet in your brain.”

  “What would be the point of telling them?” I asked. “If someone escapes from the prison there’s nowhere to go. Look, we want to get out of this situation as much as you do. We don’t know where we are, we can’t even take a guess at how far we’ve been carried. The weather on this moon is so drokked up we could be a thousand kilometres away from where we started.”

  Vickers said, “You think we don’t know that? Until the ice melts, we can’t use the doors or windows. We don’t have anything strong enough to cut through the roof; and for all we know, there’s still a couple of metres of ice up there.”

  “So we go down,” I said. “We go through the floor.”

  Eleven

  WITHOUT PROPER TOOLS—the bus’s toolbox was fixed to the outside—it took us almost two hours to undo the heavy bolts securing the access panel in the floor.

  Once the bolts were removed, Guildford hacked through the thick silicon sealant around the panel with a screwdriver. “Okay. Everyone ready? Make sure your helmets are sealed, because once the air in here hits the methane, the moisture in the air will freeze and the methane will start to evaporate. You won’t be able to breathe.”

  We gave him the all-clear, and he prised up the panel. The air clouded; the frost patterns on the windows briefly cleared before reforming into thick crystals.

  Guildford pointed the one remaining flashlight down into the darkness. “Rico was right. It’s liquid. Can’t see much through it, but I think it’s pretty deep.”

  “Can you swim through it?” asked Forbes.

  “Not without a suit. I don’t feel the cold and my skin is probably tough enough to survive it, but”— he tapped the voicebox at his throat—“This isn’t waterproof. I’d drown.”

  “Then take one of the spare suits.” I dropped down flat next to the hatch, and reached my gloved hand down into the thick liquid. “Triple insulated gloves and I can still feel it.”

  “You could put the other spare suit on over yours,” suggested Pea. “That might help.”

  Montenegro shook her head. “He wouldn’t be able to seal the second one. The methane would seep in, get trapped between the suits. That’d be worse.”

  Forbes handed me a roll of suit-repair tape. “This could work. I know it’s only designed for small rips, but it’ll help keep out the methane.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s hard enough to move in these suits as it is. I definitely wouldn’t be able to swim wearing another one on top of it.” There was a strong chance that I wouldn’t make it more than a couple of metres, anyway, but there was no choice. It was either this or stay on the bus and suffocate.

  I stood up again, watching as Forbes and Vickers helped Guildford into his suit.

  Siebert passed me the large screwdriver, the only useful tool inside the bus. “You get us out of this and I’ll talk to Copus. Get him to put in a word with the warden. I’ll see what we can do to reduce your sentences.”

  “Sure,” I said, but I didn’t believe him. In the history of the prison, no one had ever had a sentence reduced. “Close it up after me. But if you hear me knocking, open it up immediately.”

  Siebert nodded. “Will do.”

  It was hard to be sure, through the helmet’s visor and with his mutilated face, but it seemed to me that Guildford was grinning as he patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll lead. I get into trouble, you head back, got that?”

  Before I could answer, he was crouching down over the mist-obscured hatch and lowering himself into the liquid methane.

  “Rico…” Pea said, “swim fast.”

  “Good thinking,” I told him.

  Register Forbes patted me on the shoulder. “Good luck, Rico. Whatever happens out there, you’ve earned my respect.”

  Yeah, that’ll do me a lot of good, I said to myself as I followed Guildford down through the hatch. The instant my feet hit the liquid, they started to burn with the cold. I kept going; better to die quickly.

  The methane was so cloudy with sand, dirt and swirls of oil and grease from the underside of the bus that I could barely see Guildford ahead of me.

  We’d already agreed on the direction, the same way the bus was facing. The meagre sunlight seemed to be strongest that way, so we figured that the ice might have melted more on that side.

  A hand swung down in front of my face, and I’m not ashamed
to admit that I screamed.

  The arm hung limply, drifting with the invisible currents, and it took me a moment to realise what it was. Another prisoner, suit mangled, faceplate crushed. Whoever he was, he had taken refuge under the bus when the storm hit, become entangled in the suspension mechanism.

  How long? I wondered. How long was he out there, only a metre away from the rest of us, and we didn’t even know? He could have been screaming for help for hours, and we didn’t hear him over the storm.

  Guildford hesitated too, but moved on, now upside-down as he kicked with his feet and used his hands to pull himself along the underside of the bus.

  I followed, arms and legs already numb. The inside of my environment suit’s visor had completely misted over, and I could only see Guildford as a thrashing shadow.

  It seemed to take forever, though it was probably only seconds. Eventually the light ahead brightened as I reached the front of the bus and came out under the ice.

  Guildford stopped in front of me and pointed up.

  I looked. Maybe two metres overhead was a bright patch. Not an actual break in the ice, but a thin patch. Possibly thin enough to smash through.

  Guildford kicked upward, braced his fists ahead of him and hit the underside of the ice. It didn’t look as though he’d had an effect at all, but he wasn’t giving up. He swam back down, pointed at me, locked his hands together in front of him, and again looked up.

  I nodded and linked my hands, fingers locked, as though I was boosting him over a wall. He put one of his feet into my hands, and I hoisted him up while he kicked off.

  Travelling a little faster this time, he again struck the ice with his fists.

  Then we did it again. And again.

  After the fifth attempt, Guildford shook his head and pointed off, suggesting that it might be better to try elsewhere.

  But I wasn’t ready to quit just yet, certainly wasn’t willing to go searching for another thin patch, or for the edge of the ice. By now I could barely move, let alone boost him. The cold had seeped through into my bones, and every breath was like fire.

  I held up my index finger—one more try—and this time I got him to boost me.