Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  Copus said, “I didn’t say disable the GPS entirely, just the tracking. I don’t want anyone to know exactly where we’ve been or be able to retrace our path. That’s why we’re maintaining radio silence until we’re back at the mine.”

  Sloane hesitated, but flipped some switches next to the steering column. “Okay. It’s done.”

  “Good.” Copus looked around at the rest of us. “There is no freighter.”

  We watched in silence as he passed a handwritten note to Sloane. “Stay on your current vector until you reach these coordinates, then head due south. Top speed.”

  Sloane began, “But this isn’t—”

  “Shut up. Just drive. And listen.” Copus looked at each of us in turn. “The freighter is a cover story in case any of you decided not to participate. The real story is that twelve hundred kilometres south of the prison there is a small but vital military complex.” Using the backs of the seats to steady himself, he moved forward until he was standing only a metre away from Takenaga, staring at her. “It’s jointly run by the three North American Mega-Cities, and its existence is in violation of fourteen separate international charters and directives on extra-terrestrial military establishments.”

  From the back of the bus McConnach asked, “Aliens?”

  “No, I mean extra-terrestrial as in ‘not situated on Earth.’ After the war every nation agreed to certain limitations on firepower and presence outside the planet.” Copus returned his attention to Takenaga. “Hondo City does not know of the existence of this base. Do you understand, Kalai?”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  Copus hesitated for a second, then said, “We need to be clear about this. I’m not asking if you understand that the base exists and that it is secret. I’m asking whether you understand that it must remain a secret.”

  Again, she nodded.

  “I want a verbal response, Kalai. And an affirmation that you will not inform your superiors of its existence.”

  “I understand, sub-warden, and I promise that I will say nothing.”

  Next, Copus turned to Kurya. “And you?”

  A lot of the time it was hard to tell with Kurya whether she was even listening, let alone paying attention, but she nodded and said, “I have twenty-seven years remaining on my sentence. I have no doubt that by the time I return home and face my former superiors, your military base will either have already served its purpose or been exposed by some other means.”

  Wightman and I exchanged a glance. That was by far the most we’d ever heard Kurya say in one go.

  Copus was about to respond when Kurya continued: “That said, I could easily inform other prisoners of the base’s existence, and it’s conceivable that one of those prisoners would return to Earth and inform my superiors. If you truly wish your base to remain secret, you should instead work to establish a bond of mutual trust, dependency or fear between all seven of us currently in this vehicle.”

  Copus nodded and said, “Right...”

  I figured it was time to speak up. “Kurya’s right, boss. I’ve known about the base for a couple of years and said nothing to anyone, because you made it worth my while to keep my mouth shut.” I tapped at my sealed lips to reinforce the irony.

  Wightman glared at me. “How the hell did you find out about it? Wait, was this back when you were trapped out there and...?” He frowned. “I always kinda wondered how you made it back to the prison on your own. You said it was just sheer determination, but that doesn’t fill oxygen tanks, does it? So what happened, they rescued you?”

  “I didn’t know for sure that there was a base, but I figured there had to be something. Our hydroponics produce more food than we need, so what happens to the excess?”

  Kurya said, “How you deduced the existence of the base is irrelevant. I am naturally curious about its purpose...” She looked at Copus. “But more curious about this mission.”

  Five

  COPUS TOLD US that he didn’t know much. He’d never visited the base, never had direct contact with any of its personnel, didn’t know a lot about it other than that it existed.

  About once every six days one of the prison trucks was loaded up with food and supplies from the hydroponic farms and dropped off at a pre-arranged location. I’d already worked that out, a long time ago, but never had the means or the chance to find out much more than that.

  Copus said, “There’s a shielded comm-link between the base and the prison. A physical line, not just a radio link. It has one purpose: to send a distress signal. The only people who know about it are Governor Dodge, Giambalvo and myself. The long-standing agreement is that in the event of an emergency—an uncontrollable riot, an invasion, a natural disaster that threatens the safety of the prison—we trigger the alarm and they come to our aid.” He glanced at me. “Got to say, the closest we came to hitting it was when your party went missing.”

  Sloane snorted. “I’m guessing that you never expected the alarm to go both ways.”

  “Correct,” Copus said. “Twenty-eight minutes ago we received a video signal through that channel from Captain Apolla Harrow.” He triggered a holo-projection, and a frozen image of a wide-eyed, pale-skinned woman appeared in the air beside him. She was too close to the camera to see much behind her other than part of a wall and the edge of a doorway. “We’re assuming that she was in command, but we’ve no way of knowing that for certain. Sound’s missing for the first few seconds.”

  He played the message, and the holo rushed into life. Harrow spun around to check behind her, then turned back. She silently mouthed something, then briefly looked behind her again. She was clearly anticipating something bad.

  McConnach said, “She’s scared.”

  Before anyone else could respond, the sound kicked in. “—the drokk out before he kills us all! I repeat: This is Huygens Base. We have a code red situation and require immediate assistance! At least eight dead with—” Something flashed behind Harrow and an exit wound appeared in her chest. As she toppled forward, the projection froze again.

  “That’s all we’ve got,” Copus said.

  We sat in silence for a few moments, then Takenaga asked, “How do you know her name? We can’t see her tunic label from this angle, and even if we could, it would only show her surname.”

  “Governor Dodge identified her,” Copus said. He dropped into the nearest seat and turned to rest his arm on the seat’s back as he faced us. “She sent him a comm through standard channels a few years back. He said it stuck in his memory because he had no idea who she was or why she’d established contact, and then his reply got bounced.”

  I said, “So she was sowing seeds just in case she ever needed him. Smart.” I gestured towards the spot in the air where the projection had been. “Can you show us again, boss? Run it at quarter speed, see if there’s anything else we can get from it.”

  Over the next hour, we watched the footage four more times, then frame-by-frame, all the while picking out anything that might be relevant.

  It was McConnach who spotted that the faded and heavily scraped-away writing on the wall-panels behind Harrow was originally the phrase ‘Until Inner Door Is Sealed.’ “She’s in an airlock, no doubt about it.”

  Wightman said that the panels themselves were not what you’d expect to see in an established base: “That’s a ship. Military, is my guess. The holo is too low-res to be sure, but I think we’re looking at foamed-steel panels. There used to be a manufacturing station in the asteroid belt that specialised in foamed-steel. It’s very light, very strong, and can only be made in a zero-g environment. But it costs three times as much as standard steel or titanium plating, so it’s really only the military that can afford it. You wouldn’t use it to build a base.”

  Takenaga said, “She used the word ‘he’ but didn’t give a name. That implies that it’s someone she knows.”

  My own contribution to the discussion seemed pretty minor at first. “The camera didn’t move. That means it’s fixed, not hovering or being
held. And she was shot from behind... Could be they knew what she was doing and wanted to stop the message from getting out. Or they were not thinking clearly for whatever reason.”

  But it was Zera Kurya who spotted something that the rest of us were kicking ourselves for missing. “Captain Harrow broke radio silence so obviously this is a drastic situation; but she did not mention the prison. Her demeanour indicates that she was not in the right mindset for subterfuge, making it unlikely that she was hiding the recipient of her message. We cannot conclude with any certainty that the prison was the intended recipient.”

  I said, “Okay... But the comm link between Huygens and the prison is isolated, so no one is going to pick up that message by accident. If Harrow was hoping to contact her superiors on Earth—or someone else; who knows?—they didn’t get the message.” I looked up at Copus. “What’s the base’s complement?”

  He shrugged. “Unknown.”

  Wightman said, “Well, it’s at least eight people fewer than it was yesterday.”

  Sloane called out, “Hold tight—we’re on those coords. Making a sharp left now.”

  I’d half expected a brief countdown, but Sloane wasn’t playing around: we were all immediately flung to the right, and for a few seconds my stomach threatened to heave as the bus’s grav-plating struggled to keep up with the shifting g-force.

  When our path had straightened out, Copus said, “Jovus, Ernie! Next time, give us a heads-up!”

  Sloane sighed theatrically. “Gotcha, boss...” He lowered his voice a little, but not so I couldn’t hear him. “Reckon you shouldn’t engage Dredd and the others. They’re prisoners, for Grud’s sake. Murderers. We can’t trust a word they say.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Especially that drokker. If he told me my name was Ernie Sloane, I’d contact my mother to check, and even then I wouldn’t believe her.”

  “These three were Judges,” Copus said, “just like us.”

  “Yeah? Well, forgive my candour, boss, but they turned their backs on their Justice Departments. Sold them out.”

  Takenaga laughed. “So did we, Sloane. There’s not one of us here because we love guarding prisoners. We’re here because we love getting paid.”

  “Enough,” Copus said. “Rico, you were making a point?”

  “Just that if very few people in the prison know about the comm link, could be true at the base too. The grunts know that the prison exists, but not about the link. They might be expecting aid from another military outfit. That could take days.”

  They all took a moment for that to sink in, then Takenaga said, “There are military and research bases on Jupiter, the asteroid belt and Mars—and probably a few in between—but Huygens Base is covert; even in an emergency they won’t risk compromising it. Earth is about eighty light-minutes from Saturn, on average. That’s two hours forty minimum to send a radio message and receive a response... Upshot is, even if there was a team geared up and ready to go on the next closest base, the message would still have to be relayed from Earth, and the team would have to get here. Unless there’s a military ship in orbit right now, my guess is the earliest Huygens can expect backup is two days.” She looked around and saw the rest of us staring at her. “What? I’m a military buff.”

  Copus nodded slowly at that. “So there’s a chance they have no idea that we’re coming.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “And we don’t know what’s there waiting for us. So unless some new intel shows up before we get there, I think we need to approach with extreme caution. If some hostile force has taken the base and they have access to military weaponry—judging by the distance from the airlock door and the size of the exit-wound in Harrow’s chest, that gun was at least a point-five-oh calibre—then we’re potentially walking into a firestorm.”

  McConnach pulled herself out of her seat and moved to the seat across from me. “Dredd’s right. We don’t know the situation, the topography, or anything about the base itself. For all we know there could be a thousand trigger-happy grunts there who’re going to open fire on any unknown vehicle that gets too close—including us. They could be already tracking us.”

  That was a sobering thought.

  I remained silent for a while, letting the problem stew in the back of my brain as I half listened to the others making plans for what they hoped was the most likely situation.

  Between them Takenaga and Wightman worked out that Huygens Base couldn’t hold more than eighty personnel, based on the amount of food that we supplied. That gave them a starting point. Assuming twenty-four square metres per person, that made the base around two thousand square metres in area.

  “Sounds about right for an office,” said Copus. “But military bases have crew quarters and vehicle hangars and weapons storage. So I reckon we can double it. Four thousand square metres.”

  “That’s floor space,” McConnach said. “It won’t be a conveniently rectangular single-storey building, will it? It’ll be multiple floors. Some of the base could be underground, for insulation, and easier to defend. Or to hide: for all we know, it’s completely hidden.”

  “That’s possible,” Takenaga said. “You heard the stories about Planitia Four? No? Story goes that it was a secret underground base on Mars, built by the Americans a hundred years ago. Staffed by a team of ten people, all sworn to ultimate silence. Whatever they were doing there was so secret that when the Roussom Corporation set up its first Mars settlement and chose the exact same location as Planitia Four—their computers used the same algorithm to find the best spot for sunlight-capture, bedrock solidity, storm-shelter, and so on—the staff at Planitia had no choice but to self-destruct the base and take their own lives. The whole thing was passed off as an unexpected underground cave-in.”

  Sloane said, “Bull. If it was that secret, there wouldn’t even be rumours about it.”

  “The point is, Huygens Base might not be visible from the surface. So how are we going to know when we’ve found it?”

  I had to admit, Takenaga had a point there. And even if their rough calculations and estimates were accurate, and even if we could find the place, it was still a military base. Finding it is one problem; getting inside would be something else entirely.

  It wouldn’t be impossible—no building is completely impenetrable—but it was going to be tough. Especially since my old friend sub-warden Martin Copus seemed to have forgotten why some of us were on Titan in the first place.

  I decided that it would be best to deal with the problem now rather than when we reached the base and it was too late.

  “Boss?”

  Copus was sitting slumped forward in his seat. “What now, Dredd?”

  “Why are we here?”

  He raised his head and looked at me. “Have you not been paying attention?”

  “No, I mean, we as in myself, Kurya and Wightman.”

  “Because you and Wightman are mods and you can go out into the Bronze without a suit. And Kurya’s here because she was a Med-Judge and I’m not about to put Doctor Mollo’s life at risk if I don’t have to; plus she was training to be part of an elite strike-force before she was arrested.”

  Kurya said, “That is true.”

  I nodded. “Good. Fine. Now... how are we supposed to help? Wightman and I scout ahead, find an entrance? Kurya backs us up, using her skills to breach the base. So we get inside undetected, somehow, and we find Captain Harrow if she’s still alive and then... what? If we come under attack, I’m not sure that I’m comfortable facing a potential shoot-out where their side is armed with military weaponry and our side is fighting back with nothing more substantial than hopes and prayers.”

  Copus stared at me, and even over the constant rumble of the bus’s engines I could hear him dry-swallow. Under his breath he muttered, “Stomm.”

  I was enjoying this too much, I admit. Slowly, but cheerfully, I asked, “Isn’t it kind of against the rules—and common sense—to equip your prisoners with guns?”

  Six

&nb
sp; OF ALL THE moons in the solar system, only Titan has an atmosphere with a density comparable to that on Earth. In fact, the atmosphere is denser than Earth’s. Which means, of course, that Titan is the only moon that has powerful winds. That’s one of the reasons its surface looks more Earth-like than almost any other moon: the winds mean erosion. Drifting sands, storms, the constantly freezing and thawing methane lakes... they all contribute to grinding everything down, stripping the rough edges from craters and crevasses and boulders and rocks.

  The moon’s air is almost completely nitrogen, with the remainder being methane and hydrogen. None of which are conducive to human health... unless that human has been modified.

  So under a brown, poisonous sky, Kellan Wightman and I trudged side by side over the dusty, rocky landscape. It was like walking across an eternal stony beach at sunset on an overcast winter’s day.

  Not that we felt the cold much. Our polymer-laced skin and artificial blood helped keep us moving in conditions that would kill an unmodified person in seconds. Our coated eyes blinked without tears, our sealed mouths and noses kept the frost from forming within our paper lungs.

  My friend Donny Guildford, now long dead, once explained to me that a mod’s artificial lungs don’t actually breathe methane, as most of the mods believed. “The body needs oxygen and there’s no oxygen in methane. It’s CH4: four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom. What the apparatus is doing is extracting water-vapour from the atmosphere and using molybdenum-sulphide to strip its hydrogen atoms. What’s left is oxygen. It’s a miniaturised version of the prison’s atmosphere processing system, except that the big machines burn the hydrogen as fuel instead of discarding it. Besides, if they could somehow have modified our lungs to breathe methane instead of oxygen, we’d suffocate when there’s no methane around, right?”

  While I did understand the science, I didn’t like to think about it too much. Tucked away in some cryogenic freezer inside the prison were my original lungs and a couple of kilograms of other body parts they’d had to remove to modify me. That’s a much more comforting thought: that when my sentence is done, those pieces will be returned to me and the process will be reversed. I quite like the idea that my lungs are still going to be twenty years old when the rest of me is hitting forty. Well, roughly. It’s hard to be accurate about how old I really am, being a growth-accelerated clone.