Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  “That’s what I was thinking, too.” She smiled back at me and I instantly felt queasy. Not because I didn’t like her—because I did.

  She was barely up to my shoulder. A tiny, fierce, black-haired Scot with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and a cheeky, twinkling grin that was guaranteed to lift your heart... but I knew what I looked like. Sewn-up mouth, grey mottled skin, half my face taken up with cybernetic implants.

  Genoa didn’t seem to care that I was a mod. She liked me anyway. Or she pretended she did, and that was kind of the problem. I wasn’t sure.

  So I refrained from giving her hand an extra little squeeze as I pressed the steri-patch into place over the imaginary wound. “It’s in a corn field, so my guess is it’s probably distilled corn mash. Moonshine.” I glanced towards the far end of the dome, a hundred metres away, where I could just about see Ryan Hubble’s head moving around.

  Hubble was not the brightest. Genoa had once told him, “Hen... it’s pretty clear that yer elevator disnae go all the way to the top floor where the lights are on but no one is home.”

  I said, “I hope that drokker’s not trying to open it. Parenteau used to booby-trap her larger drums, especially if it was a batch she was particularly proud of. She—”

  That was as far as I got, because at that moment Ryan Hubble attempted to open the drum. Or maybe he just kicked it, or they’d damaged the seal digging it clear.

  Whatever the cause, for a brief moment I saw Hubble illuminated by something at his feet. And then he was gone, instantly swallowed by an orange ball of flame.

  The explosion rippled through the gardens considerably faster than the sprinkler system could react—almost faster than I could react.

  I saw the flare, then the fireball, and then I grabbed hold of Genoa’s arm and pulled her towards me, stepped to the side and spun, pushing her down to the ground ahead of me. I threw myself on top of her a half-second before the flames gushed over us.

  If this had happened on Earth, none of us would have made it, but the initial blast shattered the plasteen dome and Titan’s oxygen-poor atmosphere rushed in, suffocating the flames almost as fast as they spread. The result was an arc of fire racing through the gardens as the transparent panels overhead blistered and shattered, spraying the area with semi-molten shards.

  The fireball rolled over us with enough heat to scorch even my polymer-toughened skin. I heard the airlock between the gardens and the rest of the prison slam shut: an emergency protocol. I heard the rush of the flames as they engulfed our crops, the howl of the winds chasing the fire. Screams abruptly cut off.

  A few metres ahead of me, Dustin Enigenburg desperately thrashed about in the loose dirt as he tried to smother the flames burning through his overalls.

  Even as the dome’s heat-warped steel girders started to crash down, I was up and running, dragging Genoa by the hand, all too aware that she was simultaneously suffocating and freezing.

  Ahead of us, Rho Kenworth was hauling the smouldering Enigenburg to his feet. She turned back for a second and our eyes met: we both knew he was not going to make it. He had only barely turned away from the blast before it hit. His beard and hair were gone and the left side of his face was a scorched mass of blisters filled with pus and blood that was already freezing solid.

  The logical action would have been for me and Kenworth to leave our non-mod colleagues behind and save our own lives... but the real danger to us had already passed. The cold didn’t affect us, and we could breathe in Titan’s atmosphere. We could have strolled back to the main prison block without any worries other than negotiating the fallen girders and cooling lumps of melted plasteen.

  But, like me, Kenworth had been a Judge, and no matter how far we might have fallen, there was one trait we’d learned at the Academy of Law that had stayed with us: you don’t abandon the weak, you protect them.

  I half-dragged Genoa up to Kenworth, and we swapped. I hoisted Dustin Enigenburg onto my shoulder, Kenworth scooped up Genoa in her arms, then we ran towards the airlock leading into the prison.

  Something exploded off to our left, but this wasn’t the time to check.

  Ahead, a seventy-year-old inmate I knew only as Jexter was lying face-up, eyes open, his hands clutching at his throat.

  If we’d stopped to help him, Genoa and Enigenburg would have died too. We stepped over Jexter’s thrashing, twitching body and kept going.

  Another explosion from the left, this one much, much larger. A lump of shrapnel the size of a dinner-plate shot past my head so fast I almost didn’t even see it—but I heard it strike a support pillar.

  Later, I found it still embedded there: a razor-edged chunk of a semisolid-oxygen cylinder, buried so deep into the pillar that I wasn’t able to pull it out. Matter of fact, it’s still there now.

  Genoa and Enigenburg almost didn’t make it. Have to say, they wouldn’t have made it if sub-warden Copus hadn’t stepped out through the airlock and thrown something over-arm towards us.

  Thanks to the moon’s low gravity and his good aim, it landed three metres in front of me. I scooped it up without slowing, tossed it back to Kenworth. “Oxygen mask! Put it on her!”

  Twenty metres closer, a second oxygen mask landed nearby, and again I threw it to Kenworth: “I can’t do it from this angle and keep running!”

  So Rho became the hero, I guess, and I’m happy with that. She was carrying Genoa Amin, who by now was barely conscious and close to freezing solid, and she still managed to put the mask on Dustin while he was passed out, swinging back and forth over my shoulder.

  It was the longest run I’d ever made, even though it didn’t take much more than fifty seconds.

  Rho Kenworth, Dustin Enigenburg, Genoa Amin and I were the only survivors. Seventeen inmates and four guards lost their lives, thanks to Melissa Parenteau’s highly explosive moonshine erupting next to a ten-kilogram sack of high-grade fertiliser.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by a long way.

  After Doc Mollo and his crew checked me over—a few scorches and scratches, nothing that wouldn’t heal—I was dismissed from the med-centre.

  I returned to the airlock looking out at where the gardens used to be and saw Copus still staring out through the cracked plasteen window.

  He must have seen my reflection as I approached. Without turning around, he softly said, “Dredd...”

  I moved next to him, and we both looked out at the devastation where there had once been fields and crops and trees. The soil was a mess of shattered plasteen fragments, black-charred plant matter and newly-formed ice.

  “It’s gone,” Copus said. “Even the tubers couldn’t have survived that. Without the gardens, we are screwed. Next transport is five months away.”

  I said, “I know. But if we start rationing—”

  “The storehouse was hit too.” He pointed off to the right, where the remains of a concrete building still smouldered. “The crates were airtight and should have been able to withstand the damage, but...” He shrugged. “That’s what you get when you keep your emergency O2 tanks in the same place as your food. All because Governor Dodge was too cheap to build a separate storehouse.” He glanced at me. “You mention that I said that, and—”

  “I won’t. What about the air-recyclers?”

  “They’re working as long as the generator keeps spinning. They’ll sustain us.”

  That was something of a relief. Without the gardens to convert our carbon dioxide, the recyclers were now our primary source of oxygen.

  We stood side-by-side in silence for a moment. Captor and captive, prisoner and guard. We were not friends, but we understood each other.

  I said, “We should be okay for water. If there are any leaks, the water will have frozen, so we can just go out and bring it back in. Food’s the priority. We need to start rebuilding the dome. Or at least find space to plant some kind of garden. Immediately.”

  Copus nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. The old gymnasium at the end of F-B
lock is airtight. We can set up lamps; we’ll be using a lot more power than if we had a glass dome, but it’s somewhere to start. Giambalvo has recommended we plant watermelons, squashes, peas and legumes. They start consuming CO2 the moment they sprout, a little over a week after planting.”

  “That’ll help keep everyone busy... Mister Copus, how long do we have?”

  He shrugged. “Based on what we’ve salvaged from the storehouse, we figure that if we ration half a food block per person every four days, we can last almost three months.”

  “A half-block every four days isn’t nearly enough.”

  Copus nodded. “We know. Plus-side, the inmates will be too weak with hunger to riot.”

  I said, “Down-side, you’ll be too weak to stop them.” But even as I said that, another thought was running alongside it. “Your calculations are taking into account rationing for everyone, right? Not just the inmates?”

  His teeth clenched in mild anger—though surely he must have seen the question coming—Copus said, “Yes. Everyone.” Then his shoulders sagged, and just for a second I thought that I was seeing the man inside the uniform. He looked old, and weak, and on the edge of defeat. “I need ideas, Rico. And I need them now. Otherwise, that ship will arrive in five months to a dead colony.”

  Chapter Two

  ANY HOPES THE warden might have had about keeping the situation under the radar disintegrated within hours.

  It was obvious to even the dumbest of inmates that the majority of our food came from the gardens and the storehouse. With both of them destroyed, we’d be tightening our belts pretty soon. Or we would be, if they’d let us have belts.

  Governor Dodge ordered the kitchen double-locked and triple-guarded. And while every inmate not currently out in the Bronze was sent out into the ruins of the garden to salvage anything that might be edible, the rest of the guards overturned the cells. Every scrap of tucked-away food was confiscated.

  Out in the gardens, I was one of the inmates chosen to coordinate the scavenging: I’d worked extensively in the gardens, I didn’t need an environment suit, and I’d witnessed the destruction. I had some idea of where to look and what might be out there.

  Not much, I was sure.

  We had tenuous hopes that the deep-root vegetables might have made it, but, no, they were gone. Every tuber, every root was already black and frozen. The few that looked salvageable were brought back in and thawed, but they just disintegrated into inedible mush.

  We started at the airlock and worked outwards, clearing debris and salvaging anything that was potentially useful or could be repaired. Hose-pipes, tools, planters, sacks of fertiliser, unbroken sections of transparent plasteen.

  As we worked, I saw an inmate struggling to lift a four-metre-long girder and went to help him. We grabbed hold of one end of the girder and heaved it up, lifting it off the crushed body of another inmate.

  “Cadmus Holland,” I said. “Damn.”

  The inmate next to me almost snarled. “No great loss. I owed the drokker seventeen creds.”

  Great, I said to myself, Sims. I hadn’t seen his face, and in an environment suit almost everyone looks the same anyway. Lorne Sims was another of Southern Brennan’s henchmen, a former Mega-City One Judge. He’d arrived on Titan three years before me, sentenced to forty for the murder of a citizen: they’d had an affair, she’d become pregnant, he’d shot her just in case she tried to blackmail him.

  Sims, Brennan and Vivean Kassir ran pretty much everything in C and E blocks, from the contraband to the ore-yield gambling, and I’d had a few bad encounters with each of them over the years.

  At least Sims was semi-reasonable, where Kassir was a twitchy, quick-tempered idiot and Brennan was a vicious, muscle-bound monster. You could talk to Sims, sometimes, when he wasn’t having one of his dark days.

  Sims said, “I’ve got this, Dredd. You pull him free.”

  I hesitated. The girder was heavy enough to crush my skull if Sims decided to let it drop. “How about the other way around?”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Not even slightly.”

  One of the guards called out, “What’s the hold-up, Dredd?”

  I shouted back, “Got a body here. Holland.”

  “Then haul him out of there! That’s what you’re here for, numbnuts! Do I have to draw you a damn picture?”

  Sims smirked. “Not gonna drop it on you if we’re being watched, am I?”

  “Guess not.”

  I tentatively let go of the girder, and Sims adjusted his footing a little to accommodate the weight.

  “Make it quick!”

  I crouched down, grabbed hold of Holland’s outstretched arm, and dragged him free.

  Sims let the girder crash down, then said, “He might have food on him. Check his pockets.”

  I was already doing so. “Nothing but lint and...” I stopped. There was something in Holland’s left front pocket. I shifted my angle so that I could reach inside, then pulled it out. “Stone.” I bounced it up and down in my palm. “Nothing special about it.” I shrugged. “Guess it was special to Holland. His totem, maybe.” Some of the other prisoners had similar items, though how the tradition had evolved was a mystery to me. They found a small object on their first day and kept it with them at all times. It was supposed to represent their hope or their desire for freedom or something. I never got that. I tossed Holland’s stone away.

  “We should get him inside anyway, I guess.” Sims looked around, saw a couple of other inmates pushing a gurney over the uneven ground, and signalled them over.

  I took Holland’s arms and Sims took his legs, then we lifted him up onto the gurney. As he was being wheeled away, Sims said, “The crashed ship.”

  “The what?”

  “You remember the ship, right? The freighter that crashed out near Brunel’s Ridge—you were there, Dredd. You and Kurya and Wightman. Five, six years ago.”

  “Right. The Carol Masters, en route to Mimas. We got those two survivors out of it. What about it?”

  “It must have had supplies on board. Emergency rations, at the very least.”

  “It did, but we took them. There’s nothing but a shell left there now.”

  Sims turned away, annoyed.

  There had been no freighter, of course. That was the cover story for our trip out to Huygens Base, the covert-ops military station that only a handful of us knew about.

  The base had been on my mind ever since Copus told me how bad the food situation was. We had plundered the base when we left, but there could be more supplies there, stuff we hadn’t found or hadn’t thought worth taking.

  When my shift was over, I went to see sub-warden Copus to present my idea.

  COPUS HAD HIS own quarters—along with the rest of the guards—on the eastern side of the compound, but he spent most of the time in his office closer to the general population. He even slept there on occasion.

  I knocked on the door and he yelled, “What?”

  “It’s Rico Dredd.”

  A tiny hesitation, then, “Enter.”

  I opened the door and stepped through, then stopped. Copus was sitting on the edge of his desk, arms folded, with the warden—Governor Myles Dodge—sitting in the chair opposite. Both of them were scowling in my direction.

  Copus snapped, “What is it, Dredd? You find anything worth salvaging?”

  “No. Not unless we’re going to eat the corpses.”

  That comment hung in the air for far too long, then Copus said, “What do you want?”

  With a glance at the warden, I said, “Huygens Base. Any idea if it’s still vacant? We took a lot of supplies back with us, but we didn’t spend much time looking. I’m thinking there could be more. None of our people have been back, have we?”

  The warden said, “No. But someone else might have been. Whoever was signing the cheques for Colonel D’Angelo sure as stomm knows by now what happened to him.”

  Copus said, “For all we know, the base could be long gon
e, or taken over by another division.”

  “What about the emergency link?”

  “Already tried it,” Dodge said. “First thing I did. No response.” He was still staring at me. I was never sure where I stood with him. With every other guard I’d quickly established a mutually-understood hierarchy, but the warden was so reclusive. This was probably only the sixth or seventh time I’d seen him.

  “Then we need to check out the place personally,” I said.

  Copus shook his head. “We can’t do that. We’d need a damn good excuse to leave here. We’re not going to get away with another crashed ship.”

  The warden said, “Hell with that. We dictate the rules, not the inmates. We can go wherever we damn well choose.” Then he sagged a little, deflated by the reality of the situation. “We have a couple of hours before the evening meal. This place is going to break apart the moment they realise that there won’t be an evening meal.” He pursed his lips, and ran his hand over his shaved head as he made his decision. “Dredd’s right. We need to check out Huygens. Martin, you’ll lead. Take Dredd and whoever else was there last time. We keep knowledge of Huygens Base on a need-to-know basis. If word got out, then whoever was pulling D’Angelo’s strings might decide we’re all too dangerous to be allowed to live.”

  “I can’t go,” Copus said. “It’s going to be hard enough keeping the lid on this place.”

  I said, “I’ll lead, governor. I want to take Benedict Ritter with me. He wasn’t with us last time, but he’s ex-military—he knows how to keep his mouth shut. Plus, he’ll have some idea of where to look and what we might find.”

  “Like stomm you’ll lead, Dredd,” Copus said. “You forget you’re still a prisoner here?” To the warden, he said, “We’ll sort it out, governor.”

  “Do. And do it fast and discreet, because all the stomm is about to hit all the fans at the same time and we just lost our umbrella.”

  COPUS AND I waited inside the hangar, watching as the prison’s Big Bus rumbled and hissed to a stop. Phoebe Sloane, the driver, nervously chewed her lip as she climbed down and approached us.