Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  Copus ordered that the other prisoners be taken to their cells, then he addressed us. “There are rules. Most of them you’re gonna find out as and when you need to know. But the chief rule is this: break the rules and you will be punished.”

  He walked right up to me. “You. Name?”

  “Rico Dredd.” Some of the others had their heads down, but not me. I looked him in the eye. It was the first time anyone had spoken directly to me since we’d left Earth.

  “What did they get you on, Rico?”

  “They called it corruption.”

  “It’s got to be more than that.”

  One of the other guards said, “Sir, he killed a civilian. Cleared of murder, but guilty of manslaughter, accepting bribes, subverting the Law for personal gain, possession of illicit substances, abuse of his position—”

  “That’ll do, Siebert.” Copus took a step closer to me, and said, “You look familiar... You’re one of Fargo’s clones, right? I heard about you. He was a good man. A great man. Hard to imagine that his progeny could have sunk so low.”

  He stepped back and looked around at the rest of the prisoners. “The minimum sentence on Titan is twenty years. You know why that is? Because that’s how long you have to work here to justify the cost of the trip. This is a mining colony, just like the old one on Enceladus before that moon became too unstable to mine the iridium. The work here is hard, and dangerous, and for that they want people like you. Tough guys.” He said that last part with a snort. “All of you have been deemed too dangerous to imprison on Earth or even the Lunar colonies. Titan is about as far away as you can be sent while still being cost-effective.”

  Copus began to pace back and forth, staring at each of us as he passed, and I figured he was memorising our faces. “And you used to be Judges. Five from Mega-City One. Three from Texas City. One each from Mega-City Two, Brit-Cit and East-Meg One. You were raised in the toughest academies on Earth, so that means you think you understand how hard life can be. Well, you’re going to learn exactly how wrong that is. I guarantee that by the end of your first week, you’ll be wishing you’d been executed instead.”

  He turned to me again. “You. Rico… They must really be scared of you, huh? Fargo’s little boy turned bad. I can see that. And you’ve got that ‘I can take it’ look in your eyes.” He smiled at that. “You’ll learn, boy.”

  I said, “Don’t call me ‘boy.’”

  I steeled myself for a beating, but it didn’t happen. Instead, Copus’s smile grew even wider. “I’ll call you whatever the hell I like. You’re not in charge any more. All of you are gonna have to understand that. You’ve got no power here. None. You have fewer rights on Titan than even the lowest citizens in your cities.”

  Copus turned to the prisoner next to me. “You. The sov. Sentence?”

  The other guard, Siebert, said, “She doesn’t speak English, sir. Zera Kurya. Thirty years for killing four other Judges. The exact circumstances aren’t clear, but apparently she’s never denied the charges.”

  Copus moved on down the line, checking us out one by one, and then returned to the centre of the room. “All right. Your first shift starts in a little under four hours. Shifts are twelve hours on, eight hours off. You get one day of rest for every eighteen days worked, and that’s the only vacation you’ll have. You get sick enough that you can’t work, those days don’t count toward your time here. So if your sentence is twenty years, then by Grud you’ll work those twenty years. And speaking of that... Today is Day One. The time you spent waiting for the shuttle to leave Earth, and the sixty-two days you’ve just spent in space, do not count toward your sentence.”

  He gave us a few seconds to let that sink in, then said, “Insubordination will result in days added to your sentence. Harm a fellow prisoner to a degree that he or she can’t work, days added. Each escape attempt will result in months added. Not that there’s any point in trying to escape: we’re alone on Titan and there’s no way off this rock without a ship, and even if you somehow managed to steal one, there’s nowhere to go. Head for Earth and you’d be shot down before you reached the asteroid belt. So you’re here, and you work. Simple as that.”

  I asked, “The rest of the prisoners get the same lecture?” Then, quickly, I added, “I’m not being insubordinate, boss. I’m just curious.”

  Copus walked slowly toward me. “The other new inmates, Rico, are civilians. I know that Mega-City One rarely sends civilians here, but the other cities do. The civilians get a different lecture. But you lot are special. You were Judges. You all think you’ll be able to ride this out, to coast your way through. Trust me, it won’t be like that. I hate bent Judges, Rico, so I’m gonna bend you ’til you break.”

  I smiled. “That sounds like a challenge.” Again, I braced myself for a beating, but again it didn’t come.

  Copus turned to Siebert. “Chain them, take them to their cells. And prep them for the first shift.”

  The guards chained our cuffs together, and as we were being filed out of the room, Copus called out, “Rico? That smart-mouth attitude? You’ll want to drop that. It’ll do you no favours here. The only way off this rock for you people is to keep your heads down, work hard and pray to whatever god you believe in that you can make it through. I’m the law here. Remember that. You push me too hard, and you’ll get the treatment.”

  He didn’t say what “the treatment” was, and we didn’t ask, but he clearly meant it to sound unsettling.

  We found out a few hours later. Some of the other prisoners—hardened men and women who could crack open a human skull and eat its contents with a spoon and not think twice about it—broke down when they realised what it meant.

  Eight

  “INSIDE,” SIEBERT SAID, gesturing to what was to be my home for the next two decades. It was barred on three sides—there were occupied cells on either side of mine—with a solid stone wall at the back.

  I was last in our group to be assigned a cell, so I knew what to expect: “Walk to the wall. Stand facing it with your feet apart. Rest your forehead on the wall.”

  I did as instructed, and Siebert unlocked my cuffs. “Next meal’s in two hours, inmate. Twenty minutes allocated. Then you’ll be fitted for your environment suit.” He’d said the same thing to every prisoner, in the same bored tone.

  Siebert was tall and wiry, a mean-looking drokker who was smart enough to never find himself alone with a prisoner. This wasn’t like a prison movie, where there’s always one guard who’s unbelievably sadistic, who punishes the inmates to the point where they snap. Siebert was tough, unpleasant, but he had a full understanding of who he was dealing with.

  The meal was simple; a scratched plastic bowl containing some kind of bland oatmeal-like paste, a cup of warm water that had a mild metallic tang, and a handful of raw carrots that were so pale they could have been parsnips.

  Some of the other new prisoners weren’t able to keep it down, they had been so long without solid food. Me, I got cramps and a bad case of the sweats after only a few mouthfuls. Another prisoner, a lank-haired, hawk-faced man in his thirties, was hovering around our table, constantly asking, “You gonna finish that, fish? You eatin’ that? Lemme lick the bowl, huh?”

  He tried it on me. “Hey, fishy-fish. You gimme the rest of your dinner an’ I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Take a hike, creep,” I told him.

  “Not a creep,” he said. “Not a creep, new fish.” He stared at me with wide, twitching eyes that didn’t seem to be able to blink in unison. “You’re goin’ out today, first time steppin’ out into the Bronze, right?” Then he paused. “Damn, I probably sound like a crazy person. The Bronze is what we call the outside, because it’s all brown and stuff. Guy who came here from Enceladus fancied himself as a poet, he called it that. My name’s Pea. Yours?”

  “Rico.” I decided to give the scuzzball a break. I’d learned on the streets of Mega-City One that crazy people could be very useful. Everyone underestimates them, and their behav
iour can cover up a lot of actions that might otherwise draw suspicion. In a place like this, it might help to know someone who could get around without being noticed.

  “You here for the twenty, Rico-fish, or did you earn more than that?” Pea asked.

  “Twenty,” I told him. I figured that was his way of judging how dangerous someone was. “What about you?”

  “Thirty-five. I’ll be seventy when my time is up, if I make it.” He grinned, showing off his meagre collection of brown teeth. “You were a Judge, weren’t you? Word gets around. Me, I got rail-roaded. I’m innocent.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “No, seriously. Totally innocent. I was a quality controller at Resyk in Meg Two. There was an accident, people died, I got the blame.”

  “I remember that,” I said. “It made the news in Mega-City One. You were supposed to be monitoring the fluid filters but instead you were pilfering the corpses for gold fillings and pace-makers to sell on the black market. A valve failed and thousands of litres of body fluids bypassed the filters and ended up in your sector’s drinking water. Seventy thousand citizens poisoned by the faecal matter of four hundred corpses. Twelve deaths.”

  Pea nodded. “That’s the story they reported. The truth is, I was off-shift when it happened but the Resyk controller had been angling to replace me with a droid, and this was the perfect chance to get rid of me.” He reached out his hand. “Elemeno Jameson Pea.”

  I shook his hand, but I still didn’t believe his declaration of innocence. “Elemeno Pea. Parents had a sense of humour?”

  “Yeah. Still, coulda been worse. My old man wanted to call me Asparagus.” He shrugged. “You want my advice, Rico? You hafta be like a raft on the ocean, got that? Don’t make waves….” Pea put out his hand, palm-down, then slowly and smoothly moved it away. “Just go with the flow. You might make it. You might. You don’t wanna end up a mod, like this poor drokker.” He pointed toward the door, where a figure was entering.

  The man was tall, with a strong build. He was shirtless, and it looked like his skin was covered in grey dust. Later, I found out that was his skin.

  Outside, in Titan’s dense atmosphere, a human cannot survive without an environment suit. It’s cold—eighty below, on a good day—and the air is toxic. But there were certain parts of the mines where an environment suit isn’t practical. Many of the tunnels have narrow passages where a suit will snag, and on the open plains during a dust-storm a suit’ll be shredded to rags in minutes.

  So some prisoners are modified. Their skin is injected with an almost indestructible polymer. Their eyes are coated with a thinner, transparent layer of the same thing. Their lungs are replaced with a biomechanical breathing apparatus that converts the methane to oxygen. Their noses are removed, replaced with dust-filters, and their mouths sealed. For as long as the prisoner is on Titan, he or she won’t be able eat or drink or even breathe normally.

  This is “the treatment.” Those who’ve been subject to it are called “mods” by the other prisoners.

  My new friend Elemeno Pea said, “They say it hurts like Hades on a hotplate getting it done, hurts ten times more getting it reversed. But it allows you to work in the Bronze without a suit, and Copus likes that. Makes him less inclined to add days. Plus these mods don’t do twelve hours on and eight hours off like us. They do ten-on and ten-off. Has to be that way, because they hafta purge their nose-filters every ten hours. That’s something you don’t wanna see if you’ve just eaten.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “What do you say, Rico-fish? Sound tempting?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Doesn’t matter none if it is tempting, anyway, because it’s not up to us to decide if we want it done. That’s up to the sub-warden. You get on his wrong side, an’ he will literally tear your lungs out. And I literally do mean literally.”

  THE REASON THE prison existed really was simple economics: the surface of Titan was rich in iridium deposits. Donny Guildford, a prisoner from Brit-Cit in the cell to the left of mine, told me about it.

  “Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant element known. Very useful stuff, when alloyed with platinum or osmium or titanium. It’s really hard to find on Earth, but it’s common in meteorites and here in the outer system.”

  Donny Guildford had been a civilian, a research scientist who’d taken to settling inter-departmental disputes with tiny amounts of thallium. He was quite an expert with poisons and, according to his prosecutors, had more than ten kills under his belt.

  Guildford was also a mod. He’d been caught attempting to strangle another inmate to death—self-defence, he claimed—and sub-warden Copus had ordered that he be given the treatment.

  “The operation takes five days, Rico,” Guildford told me late one night. “Heard they’ve got new drugs now that can make you forget the pain, but not when they did it to me. Five days of the purest hell you can imagine.”

  Guildford was sitting on the floor, resting against the bars that separated his cell from mine.

  “They strap you down first. Arms, legs, head. Make sure you can’t move. The eyes are the worst. Some guys say that the lungs hurt more, but not me. They hit you with a paralysing agent so you can’t squirm away, then they use a suction device to pop out your eyes. Spray them with the polymer. And even if they do now have something to make you forget the operation, it still hurts like drokk for months afterwards. Every breath, every blink… You won’t believe the pain, man. Just pray that they don’t do it to you.”

  He twisted around and looked at me. It was hard to look back, but I wasn’t going to let myself flinch. He tapped the voicebox fitted to his throat. “Wasn’t for this, I wouldn’t even be able to speak.”

  “Your mouth’s been sealed—how do you eat?” I asked.

  Guildford took hold of the voicebox and pulled. It came away from his neck with a wet sound. He handed it to me, but I didn’t want to touch it. It was covered in saliva and mucus. Guildford reconnected the voicebox and said, “They give us a paste, like baby-food. Have to push it in with my fingers. It’s drokkin’ disgusting, man.” He shrugged. “But I suppose it does have its advantages. Out in the Bronze, before they did this to me, I was constantly watching the oxygen pressure on my suit. Don’t need to worry about that now.”

  EVERY PRISON HAS its own hierarchy among the inmates. It didn’t matter how tough you’d been on the outside, when you arrived in the prison you were a new fish, on the bottom rung of the ladder, and the older fish did anything and everything to make sure you stayed there.

  I quickly learned that many of the established prisoners particularly despised former Judges. Donny Guildford had warned me to watch my back, but I hadn’t paid him any attention. I was a Judge. I’d excelled in the toughest environment on Earth. I could take anything they decided to throw at me.

  My first encounter with Register Forbes came a week after I arrived. Forbes was fifty years old, slightly balding, a once-solid build now heavy with age and lethargy. He had a lot of connections and he knew how to acquire things for other inmates. That made him powerful, and powerful men get to thinking they’re untouchable and immortal.

  I didn’t know who Forbes was when he shoulder-bumped me as I passed him in the corridor, but I knew enough to tell that it was a test.

  I called him on it. “Watch where you’re going, stomm-sucker.”

  And instantly I was surrounded by five very large, dangerous-looking inmates, all scars, tattoos and knuckles.

  One of them pushed his head so close to mine that when he spoke, tiny specks of spittle landed on my face. “You watch who you’re talking to, fish! Mister Forbes doesn’t get out of your way. You get out of his.”

  I said, “If Mister Forbes has a problem with me, Mister Forbes can grow a pair and tell me himself.”

  The bruiser telegraphed the punch. I dodged it easily, but didn’t strike back: I was testing them, too. I’d figured it wouldn’t be long before something like this happened.

  The bruiser took another
swing—I swear his fist was almost as big as my head—and again I dodged it. And then two of his friends grabbed hold of my arms.

  They knew I was a Judge. How could they have not known? Sub-warden Copus had effectively tagged all the Judges the day we arrived by separating us from the other prisoners. So if Forbes knew I was a Judge, he must have known what was coming next.

  It was over in seconds. I kicked the bruiser in the groin, he doubled over and—using his friends’ grips on my arms as leverage—I jerked both my feet up and slammed them hard into his head. Hard enough to send him sprawling and force the others to loosen their hold. I fell back between them, rolled onto my feet and crouched.

  The two who’d grabbed me started to move toward me again, but Forbes called them off. “Let him be.”

  He came closer, looked down at me. “You’re fast. I’ve heard about you, Rico Dredd. They say you were one of the best, until you turned bad.”

  “They’re wrong on both counts,” I said. “I never turned bad. I just had my own way of doing things that didn’t sit well with the rest of the Justice Department. And I was not one of the best.” I straightened up. “I was the best.”

  “They caught you. Can’t have been that good.”

  “There were extenuating circumstances. What do you want, Forbes?”

  For a moment he peered at me as though he was asking himself that same question, then he said, “I’m always on the lookout for people who might be useful to me, and I’ve a feeling you could be very useful indeed.” He extended his hand. “I think you and I will be strong allies.”

  I ignored the hand. “That’s not your decision. What are you in for?”

  “Murder. Multiple counts.”

  I didn’t ask him if he was guilty. I could see it in his face. “I don’t ally myself with scum.”

  Still with the same calm, detached manner, Forbes said, “Then you’re going to be lonely in this place. Listen to me, Rico. I can smooth the path for you. Make things easier.”