Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  They’d already been informed of what had happened, of course. They’d cut short their shift out in the Bronze and left the mined ore behind, but on the way back they’d seen the devastation. The gardens had been the lifeblood of the prison; there wasn’t a single inmate who didn’t look forward to garden-shift coming up on rotation. Sometimes, when the lamps were on high and the air-recycler was blowing gently, you could close your eyes for a second and pretend you were standing in a wheat field on Earth. Now moments like that were gone, possibly forever.

  Sloane said, “There’s emergency rations in the bus. We...” She spread her arms briefly and let them drop down to her sides, at a loss as to what to do next. “We haven’t had lunch yet. Didn’t know whether...”

  “Unload them,” Copus said. “Line them up.”

  The inmates were not in a good mood, most of them looking as shocked as Sloane. One by one they exited the bus and formed a line. Thirty inmates and four guards, almost all of them watching me with an expression that asked, What the hell is Rico Dredd doing here?

  Copus answered that as soon as they were all out: “You all heard what happened. Some of you will have had food on you when you found out. You’ve hidden it, because you’d be an idiot not to. And the only place you could hide it—where you can also get to it again—is on the bus. Dredd here is going to pick some volunteers and they are going to scrub the bus, check every possible hiding-place.” He shrugged. “Or you could all just make it easy on everyone by telling us where you’ve hidden your stash. Who wants to go first?”

  As expected, no one volunteered.

  Copus said, “Strip. Down to your underclothes.”

  Among the prisoners was Southern Brennan, and even if he’d been of average size, the casual observer would always be able to tell which one he was by the distance everyone else put around him. But then, I guess if he’d been of average size, no one would have been quite so scared of him.

  It was still something of a mystery to me that Brennan and I had never actually had a physical altercation. From the moment he’d arrived, he’d made it clear that he was gunning for me, but it had never gone beyond threats. With other inmates, that wasn’t the case. Story goes that he once beat Bryna Ausburn to a pulp with his bare fists, used her flailing, unconscious body as a club to attack Rolando Obi, then used Obi as a battering ram to slam his way through the four guards trying to stop him.

  They put him in the coal-shed for a month for that, and the first thing he did when he got out was try to strangle the trustee who’d come to mop it out. Another month in the coal-shed.

  That suited everyone else, of course. Having Southern Brennan locked away meant a holiday for the rest of us.

  The coal-shed was the worst: solitary confinement. I’d done a couple of stints in that two-metre-cubed concrete hell, and I knew stronger men than me who’d emerged broken after only a week. You’re stripped and dumped in. The last sound you hear is the lid being bolted down, then no light, no noise, no human contact. Nothing but your naked body and a single one-centimetre hole in the wall through which air, food and water were pumped—the food was a gritty paste and you didn’t know when it was going to show up, so you had to sit close to the opening, waiting for the tiny, almost unnoticeable waft of stale air that indicates that the paste is about to ooze through.

  After a day or two, you realised that you had to pick a corner to dump in because the only other option was to push your waste back out through the food opening. And while the floor of the coal-shed was smooth, it wasn’t exactly level, so you had to make damn sure that the corner you picked was downhill.

  Longest I heard anyone had spent in solitary was eleven weeks. That was in the old prison on Enceladus, and the story goes that the prisoner in question had started a brawl on his first day, within minutes of getting off the shuttle, so he was thrown into solitary and somehow forgotten about. They only remembered him when another prisoner was caught turning a broken chair leg into a shiv and he was hauled off to the coal-shed too.

  They unbolted the lid and opened it to find that the forgotten prisoner was still alive—the food, air and water were fed in automatically—but he’d lost his sight, three quarters of his body weight, and his mind. He was squatting ankle-deep in his own waste and could no longer speak. Even under heavy sedation he was still constantly trembling, and flinching whenever anything touched his skin.

  I don’t know whether that story has any truth behind it, but it isn’t beyond possible. There’s a lot of weird tales about what happened on Enceladus.

  Now, I looked at the line-up of inmates who’d returned from the Bronze and realised that Benedict Ritter wasn’t among them. Sub-wardens Takenaga and De Luyando were frisking them one by one and searching their clothing and environment suits, which gave me a little time to think.

  I had been sure Ritter was on this shift, but I wasn’t in a position to ask about him.

  At least Zera Kurya was there. She was as much a part of my plan as Ritter. I called her out: “Kurya, you’re with me.”

  She scooped up her clothing and stepped forward, reluctantly. I tried not to watch as she dressed again.

  Copus said, hesitantly, “One isn’t enough, Dredd. I want this done fast.”

  I knew what he meant, and he understood my dilemma. I needed to pick someone I could trust and who’d be useful when scouring Huygens Base.

  Slim pickings. Of all the inmates present, the most effective was clearly Southern Brennan, but there was no way in Grud’s groovy hell I was going to get that rock-skulled drokker involved.

  Standing on his left was “Velvet” Judy Cassano, seventy years old at least—not a chance. On Brennan’s right was a kid from Luxor whose name I could never remember. Twenty years old, apple-cheeked, bright eyes and curly hair. Knifed his supervising Judge eighteen times in the chest when he learned that he had failed his final rookie test. No way I was going to take him, either.

  Murderers and psychopaths, corrupt Judges and big-time crooks, club-wielding henchmen and world-class assassins, poisoners and traitors... Every kind of outlaw, and almost all of them standing on the edge of sanity wondering how long the fall would take if they jumped, or, more likely, if they pushed someone else.

  From the far end of the line a voice called out, “I’ll do it!” and we looked to see Pastor Elvene Mandt Carbonara stepping forward with one arm raised.

  I muttered, “Not a chance,” under my breath, but loud enough for Copus to hear.

  He said, “No. Step back in line, Carbonara. Anyone else?” Much softer, he muttered to me, “Speed this up, Rico. It’s already looking suspicious.”

  Then I realised what I had to do, but I didn’t like it.

  “Brennan,” I said. “I’ll take Brennan.”

  Copus muttered, “Jovus...” but aloud he said, “All right. Get moving. You’ve got one hour. Rest of you inmates, get inside, get cleaned up. I want your environment suits checked and tanks refilled: you’ve got a half-hour break, then you’re taking over from the crew currently trying to rebuild the dome.”

  They grumbled away, with their guards following, but as Sloane and Takenaga were about to leave, Copus called them aside and said, “Hold back.”

  Sloane glanced towards me, Kurya and Brennan and hesitantly asked, “Why...?”

  Copus waited until the last of the others was gone, then said, “Dredd will fill you in.” He nodded to me. “Don’t let me down.” He walked away.

  Chapter Three

  “SO WHAT THE hell is this?” Kalai Takenaga asked. She was keeping her distance from us, hand resting on the pommel of her sick-stick.

  I said, “You know what happened to the gardens and the storehouse. You know we’re in trouble. The food supplies we’ve recovered aren’t going to last long enough for the next ship to get here.”

  Brennan looked from me to Takenaga and back. “So?”

  “So Earth is on the wrong side of the sun right now, and even if there are any ships closer who’ve picked u
p our distress calls, they’re not going to have enough food for all of us.”

  Zera Kurya had already figured out what was happening. Nodding slightly, more to herself than for our benefit, she said, “Huygens Base.”

  “Right,” I said. “We don’t know what the situation is out there, and the only way we can find out is to go look.”

  Sloane said, “There could be more supplies. Food. I know we took a lot with us, but there has to be more. What was the base’s complement? Forty?” She frowned. “Military rations for forty people on a remote covert-ops base... There’s no way to know how much is left. Could be there’s a couple of years’ worth. If so, we’d be able to survive long enough for a supply ship to reach us.” She took a deep breath to steady herself, then said, “Okay. Let’s not get crazy. We did a sweep last time. There’s probably not much left at all.”

  “What the hell is Huygens Base?” Brennan asked.

  In a way, that was kind of a relief: it meant that our story about the crashed freighter was widely believed. I had never been sure about that until now. Before I could answer, Sloane started to move towards the bus.

  I darted ahead of Sloane, got between her and the door. “Hold it. Huygens Base is still supposed to be top secret. After what we did to D’Angelo and the others...” I corrected myself. “After what I did, whoever was overseeing the colonel is not going to sit back and allow us to make its existence public.”

  Sub-warden Takenaga said, “Yeah, but—”

  I cut her off. “We can’t just drive out there as though we’re going down to the local store to pick up bread and munce. No one but us five—and Copus and the governor—can know what we’re doing, because if we get to Huygens Base and it’s occupied, or we trigger some alarms... that’s it, we’re done. If they think it’s necessary to protect their secrets, they’ll kill us. No, they’ll obliterate us—all of us—without missing a beat.”

  Now standing next to me, Kurya added, “Even if this task is successful and we return with supplies, we can never tell anyone.”

  Brennan said, “Covert military base... So the crashed freighter never existed. Okay. I get that.” He paused for a second. “Why pick me, Dredd?”

  “Because you hate me, and everyone knows that.” Of course, that was no answer at all. I couldn’t tell him the real reason, so that would have to appease him for now. To Sloane, I said, “Get on board, prepare to start it up. The official story is that we’re going out to the freighter, so it’s got to look like that—we need to go in that direction.”

  The two wardens exchanged a glance, then Takenaga said, “Copus should have talked to us about this first.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, he probably should have. But there’s not a lot of time. He wants you two back here ASAP because he figures that we’ve got at most three days before someone steals someone else’s stale cornbread and sparks a prison-wide riot. So are you in? Not that you have much of a choice.”

  Another exchanged glance, a longer one this time, then Takenaga said, “We’re in. But you try anything, Dredd, and I swear on all that’s holy we will make sure you die last.”

  “And hungry,” Sloane added.

  “JOURNEY TIME SHOULD be just about six hours,” Sloane said as she ran through the dashboard’s pre-drive checks. “That’s twelve in total, say another twelve while we’re at the base... Just to be sure, we’re gonna need O2 for forty-eight hours. Hell, the air’s not in short supply. Call it ninety-six hours. Just in case.”

  We started to load up the O2 tanks, with Kurya out in the hangar tossing them one at a time to Brennan, and him throwing them in to me through the open airlock doors. It was a little unsettling to see that Kurya and I had to use both hands but Brennan was catching and throwing them single-handed. I stacked the cylinders beside me; when we were done, Brennan and Kurya scoured the hangar for empty storage crates.

  “Six hours... That’s shorter than last time,” I said to Sloane as I slid the cylinders into their slots on the rack.

  “This time we know exactly where we’re going.” She looked up at me, clearly a little nervous, and softly said, “I’ve always done right by you, Rico. You know that.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do with that. “Uh, yeah, Ms Sloane. You have.” Did she think that this was some sort of elaborate ruse or something? That I was going to turn on her and Takenaga and then... what, head out into the Bronze with almost no supplies and wait for death out there rather than in the prison?

  But my answer seemed to take the edge off whatever was unsettling her. As Brennan and Takenaga were climbing on board, she called out, “Settle down. We’re going to be moving fast, like our butts are on fire and the only water is over the horizon. Foot hitting the floor for at least the first hundred kilometres. It’s gonna be uncomfortable, is what I’m saying. You all okay with that?” It seemed to me that she was excited at the prospect of finally being allowed to push the bus up to its top speed.

  Brennan said, “We’ll manage.”

  I looked back towards him. He could barely fit into the double-seat he was lowering himself into. He had his environment suit balled up in one hand. It had been handmade specially for him by cutting up two suits and patching them together.

  Wightman had once speculated that the only reason Brennan hadn’t been made a mod was because the cybernetic pieces only came in one size: they didn’t make artificial lungs big enough for him.

  “So what the hell is this base, anyway?” Brennan asked. “How come the rest of us have never heard of it?”

  Takenaga said, “Put a pin in that until we’re out of here.” Then she turned to me. “Are you sure this is worth the trouble, Dredd?”

  “What’s our alternative? Even if the base has been abandoned and cleaned out, there’s bound to be something that we can use. At the very least, we could use the base’s hangar as a supplementary garden. It’ll be cleaner than anywhere in our entire complex. And it’s got power, so we’d just need to bring the seeds, soil, water and fertiliser out there.”

  Once we’d reversed out of the hangar’s massive airlock, Sloane swung the bus around much faster than I’d anticipated, before shifting it into second gear and stamping down on the accelerator. I was thrown back into my seat and my head snapped back so hard that if my mouth hadn’t already been sewn up, I would probably have bitten through my tongue.

  The Big Bus surged over the pitted Titan landscape. For the first hour I couldn’t say for certain that there was any one point at which all of its wheels were on the ground at the same time.

  After about ninety minutes, Sloane eased off the accelerator and locked the controls into automatic before turning around in her seat. “All right... Ground’s a lot rougher from here, so we’ve got to take it easier.”

  Takenaga pulled herself out of her seat and came forward to sit opposite me, then she looked back towards Brennan. “Why him? He’s the only one of us who didn’t already know about Huygens.”

  I said, “He’s strong, and he’s not stupid. You guards like to pretend that you wield the only power in the prison, but we all know that’s not true. There are gangs and there’s a hierarchy. Brennan’s people are loyal to him—fear-based loyalty is as reliable as any other—so we’re going to need him on our side to keep them under control, especially if we can’t find any food.”

  Sloane gave Takenaga a smirking glance and said, “Heh. ‘We.’ I guess you can take the Judge out of the Department, but you can’t take the Department out of the Judge.” To me, she added, “Dredd, all of this might be your idea but it’s not your show. We’re in charge.”

  I nodded. “I know that. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “And you’re still prisoners,” Takenaga said. “No matter what the situation is, back at the penal colony, that still applies. You step out of line...” She dramatically thumped her hand down on the back of the seat in front of her.

  I guess that was meant to make me jump, to remind me exactly where I stood, but the dull thud was underwhelmi
ng, and her whole demeanour sort of crumbled then. She sighed. “Just don’t give us a reason to regret any of this.”

  They had no need to be concerned. The plan was as I had told them, nothing more, nothing less. Get to Huygens Base and, if it was still there and still intact, plunder it for supplies. That’s all.

  Well, not counting the real reason I’d picked Southern Brennan for the team: things were going to be bad back at the prison, I was sure, and Brennan was by far the most dangerous of the inmates. He could hardly start a riot by proxy.

  Chapter Four

  I’D FAILED TO sleep much on the journey south across Titan’s unforgiving deserts. Partly because Brennan had fallen asleep, and he was snoring so loud I could hear him over the roar of the engines.

  But mostly it was because I was hungry.

  When you first learn that pretty much all your stored or growing food is gone, the initial feeling is shock, maybe mixed with a little fear for the future. An hour later, the shock has dissipated—you’ve accepted the situation—but the fear for the future has grown to fill the void, and then some.

  There was food on the bus. Emergency rations locked away behind a battered steel panel close to the driver’s seat. Semi-solid fudge-like blocks for the others, tubes of paste for me. I could eat the blocks if I had no choice: I’d have to squash them up first, then use my fingers to push the mash in through the hole in my throat. Very messy, but better than starvation.

  I realised I was staring at the battered steel panel again, and looked away... only to see that Takenaga was staring at it too.

  There was enough food in that panel to keep the five of us going for a week. Ten days if we stretched it out.

  Thirteen days if we killed Southern Brennan before he got hold of any.

  An unwelcome thought jumped to the front of the line: We could survive for a month if we killed and ate Brennan.