Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  For the second time that day, I felt the muzzle of a handgun poke into the small of my back, and Vine said, “Last warning. Drop the gun.”

  I opened my hand and let the rifle fall to the floor, then stepped back from it. “Cuff him. He’s actually unconscious now, not just in standby mode or whatever he was before.”

  She passed me a set of cuffs. “You do it.”

  I rolled Armando onto his side and cuffed his wrists behind his back. “Give me another set. Two more sets, if you’ve got them.”

  “He’s not superhuman, Dredd. Those cuffs are a titanium-based polymer. They’re unbreakable.”

  “It’s your funeral. Along with all your former colleagues.” As I stood up, I added, “You didn’t have to pull your gun on me, Vine.”

  “You’re a prisoner. Said so yourself. I can’t let you have a gun.”

  I straightened up, and gave her my best tight-lipped smile. Like there was any other kind of smile I could give. “This creep killed thirty-four highly-trained and heavily-armed marines, and I took him down on my own and with my bare hands. You really think I need a gun to be dangerous?”

  Nine

  VINE USED HER datapad to patch the base’s comms system to open a short-range radio link with the prison bus, and we waited for Copus and the others to arrive. Vine told them exactly where to find us: she didn’t want to leave Armando alone, and certainly didn’t trust me on my own.

  I sat on the floor with my back to the wall, watching the grey-skinned corporal. “So what is this? You’re experimenting on soldiers here?”

  Vine was looking at her datapad as she lowered herself down close to me. “Dredd... You should have died out there in the Bronze, but you’re made of strong stuff. I’ve just pulled your records. I know who you were before your sentencing.” She tapped at the screen. “You were already exceptional, and now look at you. I knew about the modification process when I was assigned to this base, but this is the first time I’ve seen the results in person...” She hesitated for a few seconds, and it was clear to me that she was debating whether to carry on or just end this conversation right here and now. “No, that’s not true. Out in the Bronze, shortly after we found you... We recovered a body. He’d been modified just like you.”

  My artificial skin crawled at that. “Guildford,” I said. “Donny Guildford. He was a friend.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. He’d been shot in the head.”

  “I know.” At night, sometimes, I could still hear the echo of that gunshot. I mentally shook myself. This wasn’t the time. “So your people examined Guildford’s body. Reverse-engineered the process. And now you’ve done the same to Corporal Armando. To his skin, at least.”

  “Correct. He...” Again, she faltered. “He clearly didn’t take to it as well as you have. We haven’t done any work on his lungs or other organs yet, just his skin and eyes. We chose Corporal Armando because physically he was the strongest of all the candidates. Most of the time he’s more or less normal, but I know he has nightmares. I think we broken him.” She turned to look at me. “How did you come out of the process intact, Dredd?”

  “I don’t know the details,” I told her. “And I don’t really want to know. They wiped my memory of the procedure. Not entirely—I still get flashes from time to time—but enough that I can’t actually recall it. It keeps slipping away, like a dream I can almost remember. Lieutenant, are you telling me that your people subjected Corporal Armando to the process without suppressing his memories?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “He wasn’t a volunteer, Dredd. Seventeen months ago he was stationed on JupSat and got into a brawl with an officer. We don’t know the exact circumstances of the disagreement—a lot of the information has been redacted—but the officer didn’t survive. Armando was court-martialled and sentenced to forty years. He was offered a reduction in sentence if he participated in this programme.”

  I leaned my head back against the wall, pretty sure I knew where this was going. “You just said he wasn’t a volunteer.”

  “Captain Harrow decided that he was the best fit of all the candidates by some distance.”

  I swear, if I’d still been a Judge, I’d have arrested her there and then. As it was, I felt sick. Whatever people have said about me, they know I’m not a sadist. I don’t get off on people being hurt against their will.

  Harrow and her engineers had subjected Armando to unimaginable agony. Was it any wonder that his mind had fractured?

  Vine said, “I’m not cleared to know everything they did to him. But something inside him snapped this morning. He shared quarters with Second Lieutenants Baily-White and Underwood, and Doctor Riahi, his handler. And today, before first shift, Armando just went berserk. I saw the CCTV footage: it’s dark, hard to see much more than just a triangle of light coming in through the open door. They’re in their bunks, Riahi’s on her side, facing Armando. She says something to him, and he grabs his sidearm and starts shooting. Two in the head and one in the chest for Riahi, same for the others. And then he came for the rest of us.”

  “So what was it that Riahi told him?”

  A shrug. “Unknown. The audio quality is poor, and she was speaking softly so as not to waken the others. She and Armando were friends; they would often spend hours at night talking, especially when he was finding it hard to sleep.”

  “You were outside when it happened?”

  “Yeah. With Master Sergeant Wegryn and Second Lieutenant Matheson, checking the perimeter sensors.” She tilted her head back, looking upwards. “Near as I can tell, the damage to the hull was caused by a sack of blastbombs—shrapnel-less grenades. They were trying to trap Armando in that section. It’s the longest run of corridor with an exterior wall. Clearly, they mistimed it. But it was the explosion that drew our attention.”

  “No radio alert?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Covert ops, Dredd. Emphasis on ‘covert.’ Radio signals would be something of a giveaway. We do have an emergency link to... let’s just say it’s another base. I guess Captain Harrow must have figured that she was more likely to get a faster response from the prison than from Colonel D’Angelo.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “In charge of this entire operation. He and his elite guard are off-base right now: he has a lot of other projects to oversee.”

  “So what now?”

  Vine shrugged. “Good question. I guess I’m the acting CO until the Colonel makes contact—we have no way to contact him—but that could be weeks, even months. I can’t stay here with only the corporal for company.”

  SUB-WARDEN COPUS STOOD in the doorway and looked from me to First Lieutenant Vine to the still-unconscious Corporal Armando, and then back to me. “What the hell, Dredd?”

  As Kurya tended to Vine’s and Armando’s injuries, I explained the situation to Copus, then said, “Either we station some people out here until Colonel D’Angelo makes contact, or we bring them back with us.”

  McConnach said, “Sir, that could work out all right. Word will already have spread throughout the prison about the out-of-control freighter. We just need to brief Vine and keep Armando sedated, tell everyone that they’re survivors of the crash.”

  Again, Copus looked towards Armando. “And his skin-colour? How do we explain that?”

  “Asteroid miner,” I said. “We say that they used the same process that we do here. Except that it’s voluntary.”

  McConnach nodded. “Yeah, that’s good. And that explains how he survived the crash intact. Extra-tough skin. Vine survived because he shielded her. Makes him a hero. People are less inclined to question heroes.”

  I didn’t agree with that, but this wasn’t the time for that argument.

  Copus absently chewed on his lower lip for a few seconds, then said, “Drokk it. We have no choice. Standard maritime laws still apply out here—you have to offer help to anyone in distress. But if that psycho gets loose and freaks out, I’m going to put a round between his ears, don’t care how
much the military want to hide him.”

  “That’s the right call,” I said.

  Copus turned away. “I don’t need your approval or consent, Dredd. You, Wightman and Kurya stay put.”

  McConnach and Sloane stood guard while Copus and Takenaga coordinated with Vine on the process of checking the base room by room, level by level, locking every door as the rooms were cleared. They had to account for every corpse, every weapon. They left the bodies where they found them—there’d be an investigation at some stage—but they logged and tagged them.

  Wightman and I were tasked with carrying Armando back up to the entrance, then everyone took part in a lengthy discussion on how to transport the unconscious Corporal Armando from the base to the bus. With his hands cuffed there was no way we could put him into an environment suit—and it’s already hard enough putting a suit on someone unconscious: for a start, it takes forever just to get their fingers into the gloves—so in the end we just put a helmet on him, used strips of environment suit puncture-tape to seal the edges around his neck, rested an oxygen tank on his chest, and carried him out on a stretcher.

  Getting him through the bus’s airlock was even more tricky, because it can really only take one person at time. Puncture-tape came in handy again: we used it to secure him upright to the inner wall of the airlock—I say “we,” but it was mostly me. It wasn’t easy with so little room in which to work. When I was sure he wasn’t going to topple forward, I left him there, closed the outer door, then watched as the inner door opened and McConnach and Sloane peeled the tape free and carried him inside.

  Then Kurya, Wightman and I were each frisked and scanned twice before we were allowed back onto the bus.

  I took a last look at the base as we rolled away, but Vine had shut off the corridor light and now all that I could see was a rocky plateau.

  The journey back was a little slower, but more direct: no one cared any more about hiding our path.

  Along the way, Copus and Vine conversed with a brow-creasing intensity, their voices too low for me to overhear. Takenaga slept, while McConnach and Kurya kept watch on Armando, who was stretched out across the back seat, still unconscious.

  Wightman sat in the seat in front of me, with his back to the side window so that he could keep an eye on everyone else. “Thirty-four?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Damn. Why the hell didn’t Vine just put the drokker down?”

  “She won’t say.”

  “Maybe he’s bullet-proof?”

  “Could be, but I doubt it.”

  Wightman started patting his pockets. “You hungry?”

  I realised that I was. “Haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “It’s on me.” He hauled himself out of his seat and made his way to the storage lockers, then came back with four medium-sized tubes of food-paste. “What do you feel like, Rico? We’ve got... Vegetable Stew, Mock Chicken Dinner, All-Feast, or Supplementary.”

  “Like it makes one damn bit of difference.” I held out my hand and he slapped the Vegetable Stew and Supplementary tubes into it.

  I missed food more than anything else. Real, proper actual food that you could taste and chew. When they modify your body to survive on Titan, they don’t just reinforce your skin and replace your lungs: part of the process involves sealing up your mouth and nose. They cut a hole in your throat and fit a voicebox, and it’s through that hole that you eat and drink.

  Upside: you no longer have to brush your teeth.

  Downside: everything else. You can’t taste much any more. You have to re-learn how to talk. You spend the first couple of months genuinely worried that you might drown in your own saliva. You can’t even properly kiss someone. Can’t whistle, either, though that’s less of a big deal.

  By now I was used to feeding myself through the voicebox, but I was still a little self-conscious about it. I didn’t like anyone watching at me as I did it.

  Wightman had no such restrictions. He popped out the voicebox and held it in his left hand while he squirted the entire contents of the Mock Chicken Dinner through the hole in one go. Then he sat back and pretended to dab at the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. “Ah... bland, unsatisfying and soul-destroying, just how I like it. My lack of compliments to the chef.”

  I consumed half of the Supplementary tube—a brown paste supposedly laced with all the minerals and vitamins a person might need in one day—and tried not to think about a large bowl of macaroni and cheese.

  There’s a story that gets passed on from one mod to another about the very first guy to get the treatment, back on Enceladus. Apparently he starved to death because he just couldn’t keep the food down. Could be true. There were times when I thought I really couldn’t face another meal squeezed from a damn tube, but I knew that the only sane approach was to get it over with and try to think of something else.

  For any prisoner, in the early days of the sentence, a good distraction is to try to calculate the number of days you have left. But pretty soon you’ve worked it out exactly, and confirmed it by doing it again a few times, and after that you just subtract another day each morning.

  In my spare moments, or when things were particularly tough, I would often think of my patrol routes in Mega-City One, try to recall every side-street, every store, every block. It wasn’t easy, and on a couple of occasions I got stuck on a name and that was maddening—I once had to ask sub-warden Giambalvo to look up a map of the city and tell me the name of the block between Sal Schoeppner Apartments and Kenji Mizoguchi Block, because I was sure I’d end up with an aneurysm trying to remember it. I chose Giambalvo because I knew she’d worked in the same sector. She told me to take a hike, but the next day she stopped me in the corridor and said, “You drokker, Dredd. You had me awake all night wondering about that. I had to get up and check it out. Windward Ranch Habitats.”

  I was just squeezing out the last of the Vegetable Stew paste when Copus shouted for everyone’s attention.

  “This is the story we’re... You listening, Kurya? This is the story we’re going to tell when we get back to the mine. Do not discuss the real situation even amongst yourselves, understood? Four days ago the freighter Carol Masters was en route to Mimas when a power-coupling blew in the engine core. The crew had no choice but to detach the core and use the thrusters to steer towards Titan. They were able to slow a little so that they didn’t completely break up in the atmosphere, but they hit hard. It came down four kilometres south of Brunel’s Ridge. All hands lost with the exception of Petty Officer Salome Vine and engineer John Armando. In this version of the truth, Armando is a former asteroid miner who voluntarily underwent the same skin-reinforcing procedure as Wightman and Dredd and the other mods. He suffered a serious concussion in the crash and has been reacting with extreme hostility, hence the need for the cuffs. Any questions?”

  Takenaga asked, “Why concoct a story at all? We place them both in crew quarters. If we dock at the south entrance, we can go straight through to Admin without encountering any other prisoners.”

  “Because the chances are they’re going to be with us for four months, until the next Earth ship comes.”

  Vine said, “That’s unless my superiors decide to check on Huygens Base, in which case they’ll get no answer and come looking. We operated with almost complete autonomy, so there are no visits scheduled, and surprise inspections don’t happen this far out.”

  “Yeah, but what did you actually do there?” Wightman asked.

  “That’s classified.”

  Copus added, “And it’s none of your damn business anyway, Wightman. Are we all clear on the story?”

  I looked around at the others. They seemed to be satisfied, but I wasn’t. I said, “What was the freighter carrying to Mimas?”

  He hesitated long enough for me to know that they hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Doesn’t matter.”

  I said, “Tectonic surveillance equipment that’s too delicate to launch on its own, and has to be set up a
nd calibrated by hand. The expert in question was Professor... Paxton. Ilia Paxton. Female, forty years old, two kids. She didn’t want to be there, but she was the only one qualified.”

  Copus raised his eyes. “You’re overpainting this picture, Rico. No one is going to ask.”

  “Four months,” I reminded him. “Boss, when a new guard arrives at the prison, we all know everything about them by the end of their first week.”

  McConnach said, “He’s right about that. What type of ship was the freighter? How many crew? Captain’s name? Where was it coming from? You said it didn’t completely break up in the atmosphere, so what parts of it did? Was the hull breached and that’s how everyone died? How come Vine and Armando came out completely intact? Maybe there was a couple of others who survived the impact, but they died before we got to them. We can build on that, too, if we say that there was a crevasse or something in the way and we had to go around it, but if we hadn’t, then we would have got there sooner and maybe we could have saved one of the others. Then...” She trailed off as she realised everyone was staring at her. “Sorry.”

  I said, “Don’t be. Most of us trained to be Judges. We were taught how to spot the holes in fake alibis. And so were at least half of the other prisoners. Consistency and solidity is the key to credibility.”

  Zera Kurya said, “You are all wrong. We tell the other prisoners and guards that it was a crashed covert military vessel. We give them no further answers because we know no further answers.”

  I didn’t want to admit it in front of the others, but she was right. Keep the story as close to the truth as possible.

  One by one we drifted off to sleep. The last thing I remember was Sloane singing “The Ballad of Skrimpy Doodle” to himself as he drove. He was getting the words wrong, but I didn’t correct him. He looked happy and there wasn’t a lot of that to be found on Titan.