Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  Ten

  THE BUS SCREECHED and hissed and clunked to a stop and I was awake before the final judder of its brakes.

  Sloane was saying, “Mister Copus...? Oh, drokk... someone wake up Copus.” He turned back and yelled, “Now, drokk it!”

  The sub-warden had been stretched out across two seats. He rolled to his feet and started to haul himself towards the front. “What? What is it?”

  First Lieutenant Vine was already standing next to Sloane, looking out through the windscreen. “It’s a ship. An Omicron-Twelve. About two hundred metres dead ahead.”

  Sloane said, “It just set down. Flew straight overhead, hovered for a bit, then set down.”

  “Check the radio,” Vine said, checking the datapad fixed to her wrist. “Scan bands two, four and five if you don’t get an immediate signal.”

  I was in the process of getting out of my seat when Giambalvo said, “Stay put, Dredd. All of you.”

  Copus asked Vine, “Anything?”

  She nodded. “Just come in... It’s Colonel D’Angelo. They picked up my call from the base to this bus. We’re to hold position until further notice.”

  Sloane turned around to face Copus, “Nothing on the air, sir. Can’t even get a link to the mine.”

  Vine said, “They’ll be jamming everything. We might as well get comfortable. Could be a while before they decide it’s safe.”

  Kurya, Wightman and I settled back. We were prisoners; we were used to being trapped in a small space with nothing to do. And Vine seemed calm enough too. It was the guards who would crack first.

  It was almost an hour before Vine’s datapad beeped again. She showed the message to Copus and he nodded slowly before turning around to the rest of us.

  “Need a volunteer. Dredd, that’s you.”

  I pulled myself to my feet. “I swear, when I get home, first thing I’m going to do is send a dictionary to every guard on this damn moon.”

  “They know we have Corporal Armando, and they want him back.”

  “So why am I the volunteer? Why not him?”

  Copus said, “Walk towards their ship. You’ll be met halfway by a member of the colonel’s team.”

  “And...?”

  “And that’s all we know.” He nodded towards the airlock. “Get moving.”

  I stepped into the airlock and waited for the air to be pumped out, then the outer door opened and I stepped out into the Bronze.

  Humans are adaptable and can get used to anything. Occasionally I forget that I’m no longer the man I once was, and then something happens to remind me. As I emerged from the shadow of the Big Bus there was a part of me that expected to be hit by a warm breeze, and when that didn’t happen I remembered that I no longer really felt the cold or the heat.

  It’s the little things that can crush a prisoner’s spirit. Common experiences that we all take for granted until they’re no longer there. Here’s another one: using your teeth to tear open a candy-bar wrapper. Okay, so there’s not much candy on Titan, but that’s not the point: my teeth were now locked away behind sealed lips.

  I glanced back at the bus to see Copus glaring at me with his usual Why-isn’t-it-done-yet? expression, then returned my attention to the task at hand: walk until I meet some other person. Not the most arduous of projects.

  I’d gone about fifty paces when I saw the ship. It was smaller than the bus. Even smaller than a H-Wagon back home. It looked like someone had taken a large block of metal and hollowed out the inside, stuck the biggest engines they could find on the back, a big window on the front, and an assortment of small wings at odd angles. I didn’t know a lot about spacecraft, but this thing looked about as easy to fly as the average kitchen.

  A hatch opened in the side and a man wearing full body armour climbed out. He looked in my direction for a second, then reached back into the craft and pulled out a large gun. My eyesight isn’t the best, but even from here I recognised a fully-automatic assault rifle.

  He slung the rifle onto his left shoulder, then started to stride towards me.

  The closer we came, the more of his armour I could see. Close-fitting, like the armour Vine was wearing, but darker. No insignia or rank-markings. A few scratches on the shoulder-plates and chest-plate. Utility belt, with a handgun hanging from it.

  His helmet was full face, of course, with an almost opaque visor. Given how poor the sunlight is on Titan, I figured he had to have light-enhancing tech inside the helmet.

  We were maybe ten metres apart when the wind picked up suddenly, a brief but powerful gust. I was used to that, but this guy wasn’t: he swayed a little, almost stumbled. I liked that. It humanised him.

  I called out, “You’d want to watch out for that. We get a lot of weather here on Titan.”

  He stopped two metres in front of me, but didn’t reply.

  “So who are you?” I asked, looking at my own reflection in his visor.

  “Identify yourself.”

  “Rico Eustace Dredd. Prisoner. Former Mega-City One Judge. You?”

  “Sears.”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “No other name? No rank or title?”

  “Identify all persons on your transport. Names, duties, ranks.”

  I recognised this approach. It’s one of the methods we learned during Basic Interrogation back at the Academy of Law. Abrupt, impersonal, to-the-point. It makes the suspect feel like they have no control over the situation. It often works, too, but that depends on the suspect. In some cases it triggers their defences and they clam up even tighter.

  I found myself reacting that way. Part of me was thinking, Don’t tell this drokker anything! but then I caught myself. I wasn’t a suspect. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, not in the current context.

  So I told him who was on board the bus, and he just stood there. He didn’t nod or react in any other way.

  When I was done, he asked, “Have you or any members of your party established contact of any kind with your own HQ since you departed on this mission?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Return to your transport. Inform your CO that you are ordered to reverse your course and return to Huygens Base.”

  I decided that it was my turn to be the enigmatic one. I stood still and didn’t respond.

  He repeated himself, a little more aggressively. “Return to your transport. Inform your CO that you are ordered to reverse your course and return to Huygens Base.”

  I asked, “Is that an order? Because as far as I can see, you have no rank. And even if you had, that makes not one damn iota of difference to me, because I’m not in the military. You have no authority over me.”

  Keeping his arms by his side, Sears shrugged his left shoulder and his assault rifle slid down his arm and into his hand. Clearly a heavily practised manoeuvre, but still impressive. And probably very unsettling if you’re already nervous around people in authority.

  I said, “Cheap trick. But I was a Judge—that doesn’t scare me.”

  He regarded me silently for another couple of seconds. “You have your orders.” Then he turned and started walking back towards the small craft.

  I called out after him, “What if we don’t comply?”

  He just kept walking, so I headed back towards the bus.

  Before I reached it, Sears’ ship had lifted off and passed back overhead.

  Back inside, I told Copus what had happened, then he, Takenaga and Vine went to a quiet corner to discuss the situation.

  Me, if I’d been in command, I wouldn’t have wasted that time. I’d have gone back to Huygens. Not because I felt threatened by Sears, but because I still wanted to know what they’d been doing in that place, aside from getting halfway to turning Corporal Armando into a mod.

  Twice during their huddled discussion, Copus turned to me and asked, “You’re sure he said nothing else?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Eventually, they reached a decision. “We’re going back to Huygens Base,” Copus said. “Mister Sl
oane, start us up and turn us around.”

  As the engines rumbled back to life, Wightman groaned. “Aw hell. Just realised. Mister Copus, me and Rico are gonna have to purge our filters soon.”

  Copus grunted his annoyance. “How long can you put it off?”

  “Couple of hours,” I said.

  “Our ETA is three hours twenty,” Sloane said.

  “Should be okay. If not, we can do it here in the bus.”

  I could see Sloane failing to suppress a shudder at that. He’d clearly been a witness to mods purging their sinus filters.

  Copus said, “Hold off as long as possible.”

  SLOANE’S ESTIMATE OF the journey time turned out to be on the money: three hours and twenty-one minutes later, the big bus rumbled to a stop a hundred metres from the Huygens Base plateau.

  Sitting in the seat behind me, Wightman muttered, “We are never getting home, are we? The marines are gonna execute us or something.” His voice was thick, clogged, his breathing starting to sound sticky. I knew mine would be too, if I spoke.

  A little under eight hours earlier we’d had the fun and games of carrying a cuffed, unconscious man from Huygens Base onto the bus, and now we were faced with doing the same thing again in reverse, and our supply of puncture-tape was running low. Copus, Vine and McConnach were deep in discussion as to how we were going to manage it when a man’s voice from the back of the bus said, “I can walk.”

  I looked towards Armando. He was still lying across the back seat, facing away from us with his hands triple-cuffed behind his back.

  Vine slowly approached him. “Corporal... are you lucid?”

  “Is that you, Lieutenant?”

  “It’s me. Corporal, do you know where you are?”

  He twisted around a little. “Prison transport. From what I can see of it, it looks like two old Bekka Trundlers welded together.”

  Sloane quietly said, “He’s not wrong there.”

  Copus eased himself past Vine and stopped two seats away from Armando. “Corporal, my name is Martin Copus, sub-warden at the prison. You and Vine are the only two survivors of Huygens Base.”

  A pause, then Armando said, “I know.”

  Copus glanced back at us. “You know?”

  “I know what happened. I remember what went down. But I wasn’t in control...”

  Vine asked, “Corporal, what did Doctor Riahi tell you that caused you to lose control?”

  “I... I don’t recall that. Lieutenant, permission to speak freely?”

  Vine said, “Go ahead.”

  “I’m starving and I pretty urgently need to use the head, sir.”

  “Understood. Corporal, we were stopped en route to the prison by Colonel D’Angelo, who has ordered us to return to Huygens. Which is where we are now. We’ll get you inside, but we’re not taking off the cuffs. Not after what happened this morning.”

  Armando squirmed around until he was lying on his back, then swung his feet onto the floor, wedged them under the seat in front, and used them to lever himself up into a sitting position. He took a moment to look at all of us, one by one.

  When his eyes locked with mine, he just nodded—acknowledgement to the one man who had beaten him—then he moved on.

  Lieutenant Vine said, “All right. Let’s go. Mister Copus?”

  The sub-warden did his usual instruction-barking and they donned their environment suits, then we filed off the bus, with Armando second-last—wearing just a helmet sealed with re-used strips of puncture-tape—and Vine following.

  Two armour-wearing marines stood guard outside the blast hole in the wall of the fake plateau.

  Copus said, “We don’t know the situation. All of you keep your hands to yourselves, say nothing unless you have to. Lieutenant, lead the way.”

  I was about to fall in line with the others when Copus put his hand on my arm. When I glanced back at him, he was shaking his head.

  He waited until the others were several metres away before nodding and gesturing for me to walk ahead of him.

  “I know what you’re thinking, boss,” I said. “This whole situation stinks like the Resyk drains on a hot summer’s day.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If you’re running a top-secret military project and something goes horribly wrong and then some civilians come in to rescue the survivors, well, it seems to me that you might get to thinking that those civilians are not part of the solution at all. They’ve become part of the problem.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I figured you were thinking. Not me. You’re a perp, Dredd, so you think like a perp and you assume everyone else does too. I agree that this is a highly-charged situation, but the one thing it does not need is you trying to be a hero if something goes wrong. When we get inside, you’ll keep your mouth shut unless I say otherwise. Understood?”

  “I won’t say anything.” Not because I felt intimidated by him. Hell, I liked Copus. He reminded me of myself in a lot of ways. No stomm, get the job done, we’re not here to be friends. If more people were like us, the human race wouldn’t be so screwed up.

  Take your average start-up small company, for example. It might have, say, ten employees: one boss and nine workers. They all understand each other’s clearly-defined roles, they know what they have to do, so they get the job done. Sure, they have some fun along the way, but each one of them knows that ultimately the work takes priority. But then the company is successful and expands. Ten years later, it’s got a hundred employees. One big boss overseeing three or four department chiefs, each department divided into sub-sections, each sub-section with five or six people who have no idea what anyone else in the company does, but they’re damn sure that everyone else is getting paid more than they are. And now the company’s just another cluster of grumbling employees who hate their jobs and do the bare minimum of work to avoid getting fired.

  That’s why someone like Copus is a good leader. Chief Judge Fargo was the same. If you’re doing your job, you don’t have time to worry about how much your contemporaries are getting paid, and it’s not important anyway.

  Some of the guards were heel-dragging daydreamers. Kalai Takenaga was a bit like that. She was pleasant enough, but just didn’t seem to care much about the job. When we were out on the surface scanning for iridium deposits, we always knew that she would call a halt to it and end the shift as soon as the quota was reached or the time was up. She would literally be watching the clock and the weight of the yield. She didn’t care whether we talked or sang or told jokes, as long as the work got done, and she rarely interacted with us unless it was to correct someone who said “could of” or misused “whom.”

  But the other guards would often push us harder. For some of them it was a matter of personal pride that each shift finished with a higher yield than the last.

  Sure, it was practically slave labour and we prisoners hated every minute of it, but that’s not the point. In that example, it’s not about us. It’s about the guards.

  Back at the Academy, Judge-Tutor Semple used to tell us, “The average person can make better music by playing the radio than by playing the piano, but it’s not nearly as satisfying and it achieves nothing new. There’s no pride in that.”

  Still, it bugged me that Copus had singled me out. I’d never given him any reason not to trust me.

  Okay, it could be argued that I’d killed four wardens that time we were trapped out in the Bronze; but that had been to save my own life, and Copus didn’t really know the full story.

  Some of the prisoners were constantly in trouble, always fighting against the system, but that was a master-class in futility. The best way to avoid drowning is to swim with the flow, not against it.

  So I let it go. No point in being offended because offence is like worry: it gets you nowhere and it’s just one more thing to carry around with you.

  Ahead, Vine and Armando passed between the two marines and in through the ragged hole, followed by McConnach, Wightman and the others.

&nb
sp; Then it was my turn. As I set foot on the base’s foamed-steel floor, a thought occurred to me and I turned around to mention it to sub-warden Copus, but the expression on his face told me to keep it to myself for now.

  Eleven

  ONCE WE WERE all inside the sealed-off corridor and the air had been restored, one of the marines opened an inner door and said, “Follow me. Single file.”

  It was the same route I’d taken earlier with Vine.

  The marine walked ahead of us, and the other behind us. There was almost no way to tell them apart, not counting different notches and scratches on their armour. No insignia, no numbers, no different blocks of colour.

  Wightman must have been thinking along the same lines, because as we passed a third marine standing guard outside a door, he asked, “So, your visors have a HUD that tells you who’s who, right?”

  He didn’t respond to that, but fell into step alongside the one trailing us.

  We were channelled into a large, empty room off the main corridor where a fourth marine was waiting. Again, he was wearing armour identical to the others’, but I said, “A pleasure to see you again, Sears.”

  No reaction, but I was sure that under his helmet he’d be angry. I wasn’t about to admit that I recognised a particular scratch on his left boot.

  Sears said, “Remove your environment suits and leave them in this room, along with any and all weapons or electronic equipment on your person.”

  “I’m sub-warden Martin Copus. I want to speak to Colonel D’Angelo.”

  “Just do as you’re instructed, sub-warden.”

  Wightman and I waited as the others stripped off their suits, then we were all very efficiently and thoroughly searched and frisked. That’s something you get used to very quickly as a prisoner: we were frisked every time we returned from the mines or from outside. It soon gets so that if they forget about the frisking, you feel left out.

  The marines spent a few moments with me and Wightman, examining our cybernetic enhancements, then they ordered us out into the corridor—I noticed that Sears locked the door as he left—and again marched us through the base.