It didn’t take a structural engineer to see that he was right. Even if the inmates weren’t suffering from hypothermia and starvation, it would have been a difficult task. They’d sealed themselves up nice and tight, knowing that they had all the supplies.
“Just... Just bring it down. It can’t be that hard,” I said.
Waterman raised his right hand: the palm was drenched with blood, the skin torn away in strips. There was a corresponding bloodstain on one of the steel bunk-frames. “It’s going to take too long to pull it down.” He glanced back the way we’d come. “Can’t you get back out through the roof?”
The answer was no. As I’d passed through the atrium, I’d noticed that the rope, like almost everything else now, was slick with frozen condensation. And if the rope was iced, so was the vent. Low gravity or not, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull myself up.
“What about the window?” I asked. There was only one window on the ground floor, in the guards’ office.
Shivering, Dustin, said, “You d-drokkin’ c-crazy? Break the w-window and we all suffocate!”
“So it’s the doorway or nothing,” I said. I grabbed hold of the nearest bunk-frame and started to pull. Nothing. No movement at all. “Get ropes, get blankets,” I snarled. “Wrap them around something! If everyone pulls at the same time...”
I looked back at the other inmates and realised that plan wasn’t viable. Only a few of them were still on their feet. The others were huddled together in clusters, sharing what little body heat they could spare. More than a few lay on their own, barely moving.
They no longer had the strength to pull down their own barricade.
We were trapped.
Chapter Fourteen
SALVATION COMES AT a price, as Pastor Carbonara might have said.
For us, it came maybe ten minutes later.
I’d returned to the gymnasium, and ignored Copus as I wordlessly popped open one of the crates and found a tube of banana-flavoured food-paste. Unlike everyone else, I wouldn’t freeze to death, and I wasn’t going to starve myself just to keep them company.
“That’s not yours, inmate!” Copus said. “Drop it!”
“Get drokked,” I told him. “I’ve earned this.” I leaned back against the crate and looked down at Carbonara’s frozen corpse as I opened the tube. “So you just executed an unarmed prisoner who was already on her knees.”
“She took a run at me,” Copus said.
“She had a weapon,” I suggested. “Hidden in her hand. Her surrender was a ploy to gain your trust before she turned on you. Luckily, you spotted what she was doing at the last possible instant.” I popped out my voicebox and squeezed half the tube of food-paste into my throat.
“Right. A weapon.” He turned the gun over in his hands a few times, then returned it to his holster. “I had to do it, Rico. Otherwise...”
I replaced the voicebox and said, “Otherwise she’d eventually start again. Twist the facts and claim that she was the one who saved everyone. In a place like this, there’s always people willing to follow someone with confidence and a promise of a better life. They’re like the starving: eventually, they’ll eat dirt, because that’s the only way they can feel full.”
Copus started to nod, then stopped himself. “Hell no. Screw that. Philosophy is how people who can’t do things trick themselves into thinking they have something to offer. You get those barricades down?”
“No. No one has the strength... You could shoot out the window in the guard’s room.”
“And we’d all die sooner.” He slumped back against the stack of crates. “Drokk.”
I looked out through the gymnasium doors, then back to the body of the Pastor. Maybe she’d been the lucky one after all.
I glanced at Copus, and it seemed to me that he was thinking the same thing.
We waited to die.
Of course, we didn’t die. Not all of us.
I felt suddenly weak, far too heavy, and at the same time Copus slumped to the floor. Then the overhead lights flickered on.
Genoa had restored the power.
IN ALL, SINCE the morning of the explosion out in the gardens, eleven guards and forty-eight inmates died. Over a hundred had to be treated for minor injuries ranging from frostbite to blunt force trauma.
Eight days after it all began, I was summoned to Governor Dodge’s office, where he waited with sub-warden Copus. Both on the one side of the desk, the governor sitting and Copus standing at his shoulder. That was rarely a sign of good news.
I thought the Governor looked a little better than he had a few days earlier, when Kurya, Copus and I had freed him and the others. They’d locked themselves in Dodge’s office without nearly enough food and water, having seriously underestimated how long the siege—as Dodge kept calling it—would last.
When I’d failed to return to the bus, Kurya and Brennan had persuaded Sloane and Takenaga to let them investigate. As soon as they’d entered the prison, they heard the generator was offline, so that had been their first stop.
Apparently, Genoa had shot Brennan twice with the Kolibri replica, but the low-powered shots had barely slowed him down. He’d taken the gun and tossed it deep into the heart of the room. We never found it again—my guess it that it hit one of the magnetised parts of the generator and is still stuck there today.
But anyway.
Back in the office, the Governor was looking at me with distaste. He didn’t like that a prisoner had saved the day.
Dodge began, “If not for Southern Brennan...”
I raised my hands. “Whoa... What? All that drokker did was force Genoa—I mean, Lauren McRitchie—to reactivate the generator. I’m the one who broke the siege with Pastor Carbonara and her people. Single-handedly. Didn’t Giambalvo make that clear to you?”
“She did,” Copus said. “And we’re not denying your part, Dredd. But you’re the one who had the power shut down in the first place. You know how many inmates died of starvation in those few days? Zero. But we figure at least seven of them died from the cold.”
“If I hadn’t done it, more would have died in the long term. You know that.”
Governor Dodge suddenly looked deflated. “Gruddamn it... Taking into account the number of dead, the supplies your team found at Huygens, and the emergency supplies inbound from the station on Mimas, we have a chance. It’ll be tough as hell, but if we start the new gardens now, we might make it.” He chewed on his lower lip for a second, then glanced at Copus and nodded.
The sub-warden turned to me. “We’re putting you in charge of overseeing and maintaining the new gardens, Rico. This is a privileged position. You’ll have eighteen inmates working under you, following your orders. It shows a level of trust that, if broken—if we ever have even the slightest reason to believe it is broken—will result in the most severe punishments.”
“Do not let us down, Dredd,” the governor said.
I smiled, as well as I could with sewn-up lips. “Of course not. Thank you, Governor.”
He returned his attention to his desk and dismissed me with a brisk flick of his fingers.
Back out in the corridors, I passed Sven “Fawn” Svendsen attempting to mop the floor with only one functioning hand. He sported a thick bandage on the side of his head, and winced a little when he nodded at me. “Rico.”
“Sven.” I pointed to the floor. “Missed a bit.”
“I was saving that bit for later.” He rested on his mop for a second. “About what happened... Appreciate you not killing me. And sorry about almost killing you.”
He hadn’t even come close to killing me, but I let that slide. “Forget it,” I said. “Tensions were high. We were all on edge.”
“Sure, yeah,” he called after me. “Hey, life’s a lot better when we’re not carrying grudges, right?”
I didn’t respond to that, but I did give him a friendly wave. He was right. What happened, happened, and no amount of whining could make it un-happen.
The past is
our foundation, sure, but it shouldn’t also be our cemetery.
As Elemeno Pea once told me, “You gotta let sleeping bygones bury the hatchet.”
That said...
Sometimes you have to go back. Not for yourself, but for those you’ve left behind. If someone does you wrong, and then you move on to something better, well, the only fair thing to do is to go back to that person who wronged you and show them the light.
It was 2089. I was almost halfway through my sentence.
I knew then that I was going to make it.
EPILOGUE
TEN YEARS LATER
Titan
2096 AD
FABIENNE BROWN FOUND it hard not to stare at the scarred, beaten man on the other side of the steel table. “Are you permitted to discuss those things, Rico?” the reporter asked. “The military base, the food riot... I mean, look what they did to you, just to keep you quiet after the storm...”
“That was a long time ago,” Rico said. “Huygens Base is no longer a secret. Things have happened. And this...” He sat back and gestured to his face, throat and chest. “Yeah, it’s hell, but they’re not going to turn me back while I’m still a prisoner. You can get a lot more work done out there in the Bronze when you’re not encumbered by an environment suit.”
For hours, he’d been telling her his story, but she still wasn’t sure what to make of him. She’d known who he was before she came to Titan, of course: Rico Eustace Dredd, a former Judge. Brother to Joseph Dredd, who, many said, was tipped to one day sit on the Council of Five.
But Rico had only lasted a year on the streets. Fabienne had wanted to know why. Genetically, he was identical to Joe, and they’d received the same training. So why had one turned out bad, and the other good?
He was the reason she had wanted to come to Titan, and this trip was the result of years of cajoling and deal-making and compromises between her publishers and the Mega-City One Department of Justice.
Now, watching him sitting impassively in the steel chair, cuffs on his wrists and ankles, all she could see was an idealist who’d taken the wrong path.
Or maybe he was steered down the wrong path, she told herself.
Aloud, she said, “I’m wondering how much of your story is true, Rico. There are so many inconsistencies. And I’ve no way to verify most of what you’ve told me; the full details of your pre-arrest activities haven’t yet been made public.”
“What reason would I have to lie?”
“To paint yourself as the hero of your own tale, of course. Why else?”
“It’s all true,” he told her. He shuffled closer, and added, “But you do understand that guards will check your recordings before they permit you to leave, don’t you?” He smiled. “My guess is that at least three quarters of what I’ve told you will be redacted. And of the rest... a lot of names and details will be changed. So what is the truth? You’re only getting one side of the story. To know the whole truth you’d need to have been there. And even then...”
“Our grasp of the truth is tainted by our own biases,” Fabienne said.
Rico Dredd nodded. “Right. Pick any event... Say, that time me and Joe got trapped out in the Cursed Earth. I can tell you what I perceive to be the truth, but you ask Joe what happened, you’ll get a different spin on the story.”
“You’ve spent more of your life without your brother than with him, Rico, but you talk about him a lot. Do you think Joe was envious of you? You frequently scored higher marks than him in the Academy.”
Rico shrugged. “Maybe. He was always a closed book, even to me. Hard to say whether he was jealous or just plain inferior. But he was wrong, I’ll tell you that. They’re all wrong.”
Fabienne asked, “Wrong to incarcerate you? Or wrong in their approach to the law?”
Rico leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “Now, let me get this clear... Redactions or otherwise, I don’t want to be misquoted. The Law said that what I was doing was illegal, so they were right to punish me. It’s the Law that was wrong. Does that make sense?”
“They were right and wrong at the same time.”
Rico sighed. “You need sound-bites for your readers, Miss Brown. Pull-quotes, headlines. I get that. But you’re oversimplifying things. Good men following bad rules are still good men. Just like bad men who follow good rules are still bad men. Joe Dredd is a stickler for the rules. I’ve said that before, and I’m sure others will be saying it long after I’m gone.”
“You and your brother... You’re clones.”
“Hardly a secret,” Rico said.
“How old were you when you found out?”
A dismissive shrug. “We’ve always known we were different. I can’t remember not knowing.”
“All right. Then how old were you when you understood what it really meant? I’m guessing twelve, thirteen...?”
Rico stared back at her. “I know where you’re going with this. You’re wrong.”
“Am I? Or is all of this—everything you’ve done, everything you’ve become—just your way of proving to the world that you are real? That you’re not just a clone? You’re a person in your own right. You rebelled against the system that brought you to life, and raised you, and trained you. You don’t like the idea of being just a part of the machine, a manufactured cog. Interchangeable with your brother. You want everyone to see you as human.”
Rico didn’t respond.
“Do you want to know what I think?”
His eyes narrowed a little. “Sure.”
“I think that’s the sort of attitude that makes you human.” Fabienne reached across the desk and nudged the voice recorder a little further away from the inmate. “You’ve been on Titan a long time, Rico.”
“I know. You have a question to go with that point?”
“It must get lonely out here.”
Rico sat back, and smiled as much as his sealed mouth would allow. “So you’re a convict-groupie. That’s why you pushed so hard for this gig.”
“Is that so bad?”
“You don’t care that I look like this?” he asked.
Fabienne Brown stood up, her chair scraping back across the floor. “Not one bit. I’ve checked the rules. It’s an offence for a visitor to fraternise with a prisoner. That’s one of those rules that don’t exist for any good reason. Just like you were saying, Rico.” She moved around to his side of the table, and stared down at him.
“Do it, then,” he said. “But don’t expect me to kiss you, because I can’t.”
“Who said anything about kissing?”
The floor of the interview room was hard and cold. It was awkward, thanks to Rico’s cuffs, and it was over in minutes.
Afterwards, she lay beside him for a while, resting her head on his chest. “That was beautiful, Rico. Really special.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure was. No one’s touched me like that since they made me into a mod. Thanks.”
“When you get out, you’ll look me up, right?”
“Sure thing,” he lied. “First thing I’ll do as soon as I hit the Big Meg.”
Mega-City One
2099 AD
“NO, RICO...” JOE said. “Don’t make me kill you.”
Rico almost laughed at that. He’d spent more than half his life working in the Bronze on Titan. He’d endured hardships that would have killed a lesser man a long time ago. And what had Joe done? Lived here in his cushy, warm apartment in his sheltered city. Plenty to eat, never had to drink his own recycled piss. Never had to undergo surgery that turned him into a monster.
On the day of his release, the new warden had called Rico to his office. “You’re getting out. First prisoner ever to get early release that didn’t involve a pine box or an urn. Be grateful for that. Be thankful that you’re leaving this rock and going back to Earth. I want you to bear that in mind, Dredd. Are you with me on that? Do we have an understanding?”
Here it comes, Rico had said to himself. There was going to be bad news. There was some
thing he’d grown to suspect over the years, but had never wanted to find out for sure.
The new warden said, “Your surgery... my predecessors lied to you. It can’t be reversed. I’m sorry. Maybe in time, ten years, twenty, they might be able to fix you up a little, make you look more normal. But what Copus and Dodge told you about a freezer containing the inmates’ removed body parts...” He shook his head. “Again, I’m sorry. There’s no freezer. There was only ever the incinerator.”
On any other day, Rico knew, he’d probably have throttled the warden. But not when he was so close to release. He’d said nothing, just accepted his fate.
“Maybe back on Earth, they can do something for you. They’ve got face-change machines, they can grow limbs back...”
“Sure, yeah,” Rico had told him.
And now here he was, in Mega-City One, reunited with Little Joe for the first time in almost twenty years, and his brother was pleading with him.
It hadn’t been hard to track down Judge Joe Dredd. Just like it hadn’t been hard to break into his apartment and seal the place up airtight. Run a cheap vacuum pump to draw out most of the air. Leaving just enough so they could talk. Let Little Joe see what it feels like to eat vacuum for a change.
The hardest part had been the waiting. Even after all that time since his arrest, these last few hours had been almost unbearable.
And now Joe was on his knees, only a few minutes of air left in his helmet’s respirator. And he still believed that he could beat Rico.
He’s got it the wrong way around, Rico thought. He can’t possibly think that he’s actually better than me, can he? Is he really that deluded? Or... is he stalling? “Because you know I’m faster, huh?”
He saw Joe’s hand begin to slide towards his Lawgiver. But he was still hesitating. Weak. He’s weak. He’s always been weak, unwilling to do what’s necessary. “You’re yellow, Joe!”
Rico Dredd: The Titan Years Page 32
