Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  “Things are not supposed to be easy, creep,” I said. “This is a prison, not a day-centre. The Law put us here to punish us. We do our time, and we do not coast on the backs of others.”

  Again, he regarded me silently for a few seconds. “You’re not a Judge any more. You’re one of us. Here, you play by our rules. Or you don’t get to play at all. See, there are degrees of punishment. Some prisoners—the weak—have no choice but to lie down and let the strong walk all over them. But some of us, by our very nature, will always rise to the top of any given situation. You strike me as a survivor, Rico. You should—”

  By then, I had turned around and was walking away.

  Forbes called after me. “You’re making a mistake. This offer only comes once. If you’re not with me, then you don’t get my protection. You know what that means in this place? It means you’re a dead man walking unless you get back here and pay attention when I’m talking to you!” He had to shout that last part.

  In the cells that night, Guildford told me that I had written my own obituary. “He’s gonna come for you. Well, not him, but one of his guys.”

  “Let them come,” I said. “I can take them.”

  “No, Rico, you don’t get it. Forbes knows this place inside-out and upside-down. He knows all the guards, and he’s friends with most of them. That’s how he gets stuff in. It’s why he’s protected. He used to be a guard, back in the old prison on Enceladus. That’s where he got his nickname; he pretty much ran the prison, got all the day-to-day stuff done. The warden would say, ‘I need ten prisoners to swamp out the lower cells’ and Register would schedule it and pick the prisoners and the guards. He gave all the easy duties to his friends, dumped the crap on anyone who complained or criticised him.”

  “He was the power behind the throne?”

  “And then some. When they were preparing to evacuate Enceladus he was in charge of the flight manifests and the supplies and everything. A couple of the other guards caught him short-loading the iridium shipments back to Earth, and they threatened to squeal on him if he didn’t cut them in. He made like he was going to do it, but on the next shift he sent them out into the Bronze with sabotaged oxygen tanks. They were rigged to read like they were full, but they only had a couple of minutes of air.”

  I nodded slowly. “He was caught, arrested, and ended up back here.”

  “No. They didn’t even send him home first. The warden’s a Judge; he sentenced Register on the spot. One day Register’s got a cushy room in the guards’ quarters, next day he’s in a cell. But the thing is, he didn’t rat out anyone else he was working with. So the next day after that, Register is moved to a better cell, and his pals let the other prisoners know that he’s protected. Anything happens to him, they’ll get the treatment.”

  I said, “I thought that Copus was the one who decided who got the treatment?”

  “Officially Copus and the warden both have to agree to it, but the warden doesn’t care and Copus listens to Siebert. And Siebert is one of Register’s friends.”

  With this new knowledge, the next day I made peace, of a sort, with Register Forbes. I found one of his thugs—the bruiser, now sporting an ancient, grubby neck-brace—and told him I wanted to meet.

  I was brought to Register’s cell. Compared with the rest of us, he lived in a palace. It was twice the size of the other cells, and featured four stone walls—not a bar in sight. There was a toilet with an actual seat, and more than one blanket on the bed. Not that he’d need them; his stone-walled cell was considerably less draughty than any other place I’d seen in the prison.

  Register was lying on the bed, and when he saw me enter he tossed his book aside and stood up. “So you changed your mind, Rico? Someone’s been talking to you, is my guess. Someone who knows the score.”

  “You have friends back on Earth,” I said.

  “This much is true.”

  “So do I. And my friends are Judges. You think you can make things tough for me here? That’s a hangnail compared to what my friends can do to yours. To your family.”

  “Huh,” he said. “That a threat?”

  “Yes. And if you want clarification, try this: you hurt me, and every one of your friends back home will lose their eyes.”

  I stepped closer to him, and his bodyguards rushed at me from the doorway. I elbowed one in the face, hard. I grabbed the wrist of another with both hands, then jerked him toward me and kicked him deep in the armpit. I let his dislocated arm drop as he screamed, then rounded on the third guard—a woman I hadn’t seen before. She was a lot shorter than me, but that didn’t stop me launching a right jab at her throat.

  She expertly blocked it, then swung at me. I dropped into a crouch and kicked out at her knees. She side-stepped the kick, but her movement took her away from me long enough for me to get back on my feet.

  There was a flurry of vicious punches, jabs and kicks on both sides, all of which were dodged or blocked.

  It only came to an end when two of Register’s other guards jumped me from behind. They dragged me away from the woman and held me tight while Register checked her over.

  “You’re not hurt?” he asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.

  She shook her head as she continued to glare at me. “Nothing that won’t heal. Drokker’s stronger than me. Faster too. He’s a keeper.”

  Register glanced at me. “I don’t know... He’s dangerous. And he can’t be trusted.”

  “We’ll need him.” She pulled herself away from Register, and approached me. “Where’d you serve?”

  “Mega-City One. You?”

  “Same. Four years in Meg-South.” The woman was in her mid-twenties, and very definitely had the look of a former Judge; determined, confident, capable. She wasn’t what you’d call attractive—certainly not my type—but there was something about her that piqued my interest.

  “What did they get you on?” I asked.

  “Riot control. I opened fire on the crowd. Turned out there was a couple of undercover Judges among them. One of them survived, testified against me.” Without blinking or looking away, she continued, “Seems the Department has a problem with Judges walking up to fourteen wounded, unconscious rioters and putting bullets in their brains. What about you?”

  “Corruption, they called it. And there was a death. Accidental, but... a fellow Judge didn’t see it that way.”

  She tilted her head a little to the side as she gazed at me. “Has to be more to it than that.”

  “There is.” I offered her my hand. “Rico Dredd.”

  She shook it. “Adelaide Montenegro.” Her hand was warm, and she held onto mine for a second longer than necessary.

  To the side, Register Forbes said, “If you two are done sizing each other up? Rico, we were in the middle of threatening each other. Where do we stand on that?”

  I said to him, “Forbes, I don’t want to be part of your crew. You stay the drokk away from me, I leave you and your friends with all limbs and digits intact. How does that sound?” I turned and walked toward the door.

  “You’ll be back, Rico!” he called after me. “Sooner or later, you’ll need me for something. You’ll come back. And when you do, if you don’t want to end up like your friend Donny Guildford, you’ll come back on your knees!”

  Nine

  I WAS ALMOST eight months into my sentence on Titan when I first realised that escape might be possible.

  The other prisoners talked about escape all the time, of course, but most of them didn’t have the understanding to grasp just how unlikely it was. They’d talk about using the mining tools as weapons to hold the guards hostage, or hiding out in one of the exhausted mine-shafts.

  Elemeno Pea was particularly excitable when it came to escape plans, and he had a hundred of them, not one of which was remotely practical. “We hide all the iridium we find,” was one such plan. “We dump it deep inside one of the exhausted mine shafts. Then when the bosses see that there’s no more iridium, they’ll have to abandon the pr
ison ’cause it’ll not be, whaddayacall, cost-effective any more. That means sending us back to Earth. From there, we can get away easy.”

  Another of his great plans was that we’d kill a random prisoner every day, but make it look like suicide: “They won’t keep us here if they think we’re all gonna top ourselves!”

  And then there was Pea’s masterpiece of lateral stupidity, which he explained to me and Guildford one day as we were picking fruit in the prison’s huge hydroponic gardens: “Gravity’s so low on Titan, escape velocity is way down. So, see, what we need is to build a giant sling-shot. One of those tree-bucket things.”

  “A trebuchet?” I asked.

  “Yeah, if you want to get all fancy about it. So we build one of them and fling ourselves out of the atmosphere.”

  Guildford said, “Where we’ll die in space.”

  “Yes. No! See, we make the tray-bushy thing big enough that it can fling a cargo container. We’ll be inside it, with supplies and so on. And we’ll seal it up first, make sure it’s airtight.”

  “And then what, Pea?” I asked. The man was peering over the edge of insanity at the best of times, but he was just about the only entertainment we had. “We’d need some form of propulsion or we’d just get pulled back to Titan. Or get caught in Saturn’s gravity well.”

  “Hey, I thought of that too. We take along a whole bunch of other prisoners, then, when we’re in space, we throw them out one at a time. It’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion, right? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We throw out a guy, and he goes one way while we go the opposite way.”

  “And after the first guy we throw out, why would the others allow us to throw them out?” I asked.

  “Well, they’ll be dead. We’ll kill them first. Dead bodies are lighter than live ones, which’ll make it easier for the tray-bushay to get the cargo container into space.”

  Guildford said, “Dead bodies aren’t lighter, Pea. Someone who worked in Resyk ought to know that. They...” He stopped himself. “Why am I even arguing this with you? We can’t build a trebuchet because it would take years and the guards would see it!”

  “Not to mention that it wouldn’t work,” I said. “Besides, it’s asking a lot that we put our faith in someone who pronounces the word ‘escape’ with an X.”

  A guard yelled over at us: “Shut up and get back to work!”

  We’d been on garden duty for a week already, working in the vast dome, picking the fruits and vegetables that grew to enormous size in the low gravity. Some prisoners believed that it was preferable to working in the mine-shafts, but not me. It was tough, endless, back-breaking work, and we sweltered under the powerful lamps and choked on the rich, cloying scents of the flowering trees. So much greenness made me uncomfortable: I was raised in a concrete-and-steel city where ninety per cent of the population had never seen a real tree.

  There were fewer guards than in the rest of the compound since we didn’t have power-tools, but they kept a close watch on us nonetheless, in case we ate as we picked.

  When the shift was done, we were frisked, then chained once more and led back to our cells.

  As we reached the exit and the guards fumbled with the ancient locks on the huge gates, I looked back over the gardens. It was an impressive sight: a dozen square kilometres of fields of wheat and corn, orchards and vegetable patches and herb gardens. The plants provided the prison with oxygen as well as food. Without them, the prison would not be viable.

  And an important thought began to form...

  I did some quick mental calculations, but the answer didn’t seem right, so I started over. Again, the same answer.

  By the time I reached my cell, I realised that I had stumbled upon something that I was sure none of the other prisoners had discovered.

  There was a way off Titan. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.

  I WAS OUT in the Bronze when the storm hit us. We were a chain-gang of twenty inmates and five guards working on a newly-discovered deposit about three hundred kilometres east of the prison.

  We’d been there for three days already, spending our off-time in the huge, low-slung, wide-wheeled transport vehicle that the guards jokingly referred to as the School Bus, and were scheduled to stay out there for another week.

  The new iridium deposit was the debris from a large meteorite strike a few thousand years ago. Our job was to scan the surface for fragments—in Titan’s low gravity, even a low-velocity impact could spread the fragments up to a kilometre away—then dig them out of the surrounding dirt. Any fragments too large to lift were flagged for later retrieval by a powered digger. We loaded the smaller fragments into two-wheeled barrows, pushed them over the rough ground to the massive trailer attached to the back of the bus. It was exhausting and mind-numbingly tedious, but then I’d yet to discover a job in the prison that was anything but.

  Siebert was overseeing the dig, which meant that he’d had his pick of the prisoners. Since it meant time away from the prison compound, there’d been a lot of volunteers. Siebert picked Register Forbes and his crew, and Register had told him to pick me, Guildford and Pea.

  In the months since our encounter, Register had made it clear that he wanted me working for him. He could have strong-armed me, or threatened my friends, but he was smarter than that. About once a week he or Montenegro would call on me and ask, “Changed your mind yet?” My answer was always in the negative, but that didn’t stop them.

  So twenty inmates and five guards piled into the back of the School Bus and set off on the last journey that most of us would ever make. But of course we didn’t know that.

  The storm hit hard, and fast. The sensors on the bus were barely adequate; we had less than a minute’s warning.

  Siebert’s voice came blaring over our helmet-radios: “Get back to the bus! Now! Storm coming—a bad one!”

  On Titan, the weather comes at you like an invisible psychopath wielding an irresistible grudge and a stealth chainsaw. One minute it’s all calm and clear skies—well, as clear as they ever get, which isn’t saying much—and the next, there’s two-hundred-KPH winds and hailstones the size of your fist. I’ve heard that it wasn’t always so extreme, but a few years back some of the bigger cities collaborated in an attempt to terraform Titan, to turn it into another Earth. They installed atmosphere processors and weather-controlling satellites, and attempted to cap a couple of active volcanoes. They didn’t want the same thing happening on Titan that had destroyed the mine on Enceladus.

  It failed quite spectacularly when one of the volcanoes erupted prematurely and incinerated eighty-one engineers and a billion credits’ worth of equipment. The project was abandoned, leaving only the engineers’ mining base and a handful of outstations. But the volcanic eruption had released millions of tonnes of iridium ore... No one wanted to leave that behind, but no one was dumb enough to volunteer to stay and mine it. The best compromise was to give the hard work to those members of society whose lives weren’t worth much.

  The prisoners were always chained around the waist. The chains were hardened steel, tough enough that it would take several hours to cut through with the tools we were given. I was chained to Guildford, Pea and a guy I didn’t know. We’d been maybe two hundred metres from the bus, returning with barrow-loads of iridium ore, when we got the call. We made it back seconds before the first hailstones slammed into the side of the bus.

  The bus’s windows were made of thick plastiglass. Tough enough to withstand the storm, clear enough that we could see the others caught outside, abandoning their barrows and pick-axes and running hell-for-leather for safety.

  Guildford was next to me at the window, looking out. A hailstone exploded against the glass right in front of us. “Jovus... This is gonna be a bad one!”

  To the east, the sky was darkening.

  Ten

  OUTSIDE, A HAILSTONE struck one of Forbes’s men in the back of the head. He went down at once, and never moved again. Or not voluntarily: his colleagues were
still chained to him.

  As they tried to drag the corpse over the hail-scattered ground, one of them was hit in the elbow. Though it should have been impossible over the roar of the storm, I swear I heard the crack.

  “Get out there!” I shouted to Siebert. “Unlock them!”

  He shook his head. “There’s no point. It’d take too long for me to put on my suit.”

  “Then give me the key. I’ll do it!”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “No drokkin’ way are you getting my key!”

  Another flurry of hailstones ripped into the side of the bus, hard enough to rock it, and outside I saw the dead man’s colleagues drop. The last one alive was smart: with considerable effort he pulled his friends’ corpses over himself.

  All we could do was wait. All five guards—unencumbered by chains—were back in the bus, but of the twenty prisoners, only eight of us had made it.

  Someone said, “Food and water’ll last longer this way, I guess.”

  I turned from the window to see who’d spoken, and saw Register Forbes slam his fist into the side of another prisoner’s head. “Those are my people out there!”

  Again, I said to Siebert, “Give me the key.”

  He backed away from me. “No. It’s policy. No matter what happens, I can’t give a key to a prisoner.”

  “I’m not going to report you, damn it! That guy’s still alive out there—better to go back with nine prisoners than eight! Just give me the drokkin’ key!”

  Forbes said, “Do it, Siebert. Where’s he going to run to?”

  Siebert wouldn’t look me in the eye as he unclipped the electronic key from his belt.

  Guildford said to me, “Let me do it. I don’t need a suit.”

  “I’m faster than you, and smaller,” I said. “Less of a target. Siebert?”

  Siebert placed his thumb on the key’s scanpad. “You’ve got a hundred seconds before—”