Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  Sloane said, “What?” but he was already firing up the engine.

  Copus shoved the door open the rest of the way, and grabbed hold of my collar. “What the hell have you done, Rico?”

  I forced myself to keep calm. “He tried to kill us. I don’t make deals with people who’ve tried to kill me.”

  There was no guarantee that it would work; I knew that. But the chances were strong. I might not be as academically gifted as Colonel Peter D’Angelo, but he had never worked the streets of Mega-City One.

  A lack of conscience was no match for knowing how to fight dirty.

  About four minutes into the journey, I pulled my communicator out of my pocket, set it down and jacked up the volume for everyone to hear.

  A muffled voice said, “He was lying! Why would he hide Armando in a body bag?”

  Another voice: “So we wouldn’t see him so easily. That’s what hiding something means, spugwit!”

  Rustling sounds, then a third voice, clearer: “Sergeant Lancaster—something under there! That one is moving!”

  I could picture the scene: Lancaster and the others checking through the body bags they’d piled up earlier. It would take them a few minutes to free Armando from underneath his former colleagues. Probably a lot less time than it had taken me to pile their bodies on top of him.

  Lancaster: “Get him out of there. You two, keep your weapons ready. And a set of cuffs.”

  More grunting and thumping as bodies were pulled from the heap, then the first voice again, much clearer now: “Cut him out, Evans.”

  A knife slicing through thick plastic. I turned to the others in the bus. “Don’t worry. I tied him up.”

  Then Lancaster again: “What...? Oh, right. Dredd put a helmet on him so he could breathe under there. Smart. Okay. Get him on his feet. But leave the tape on his mouth and his hands tied.”

  Colonel D’Angelo, sounding several metres away. “He’s alive. So Dredd wasn’t lying.”

  “No, sir,” Lancaster said. “What’s our next move?”

  “Take Evans and get back to the ship. Destroy the prison transport before it can make contact.”

  Copus muttered, “Stomm!” then turned to Sloane. “Full speed! We can’t outrun it but—”

  I laughed. “No need, boss.” I picked up the communicator and hit the Transmit stud. “Hey, Colonel, you back-stabbing drokker!”

  A second’s silence, then Lancaster’s voice, very clear. “There’s a communicator in the helmet—they’ve been listening!”

  “We have,” I said. “And now it’s your turn to listen. All of you. Including Corporal John Armando.” I took a deep breath, savouring the moment. “Unfettered Hematophagy.”

  Their screams were loud, but didn’t last very long.

  After some debate, Copus ordered Sloane to turn around, taking us back to the base once more.

  By the time we got in, Armando had reverted to the same comatose state he’d been in when I first saw him, and, well, I won’t say it was easy to subdue him again, but between us we managed it.

  HUYGENS BASE IS still there, to the best of my knowledge. One day someone will find it, and maybe they’ll wonder where it came from and why there are so many corpses on board. They might even wonder why there’s a small, unmarked military-grade ship in the hangar.

  If anyone does ever start asking questions, none of us who survived that rescue mission will talk, I know that for sure.

  Corporal John Armando and First Lieutenant Salome Vine were picked up several months later by the next ship from Earth. We will probably never know what happened to them after that.

  Kellan Wightman’s death was listed as an accident. Unavoidable.

  At least the ‘unavoidable’ part of that is true. I knew him. He might not have wanted to die that way, but I like to think that he would have understood.

  I didn’t want to do it, but it was the choice that led to the best outcome. I’m not happy with that, but I can live with it.

  Just like I can live with the endless winds that howl across Titan, rattling the windows and shaking the buildings, the newbie prisoners screaming and crying and praying and pleading, the mine’s machinery that never stops rumbling and grinding. I’ve become acclimatised. None of that keeps me awake any more.

  I can sleep at night.

  The End

  RICO DREDD: THE TITAN YEARS

  FOR I HAVE

  SINNED

  Michael Carroll

  Titan

  2089 AD

  Prologue

  “WE DWELL IN darkness. Our physical lives are but a brief flare, nothing more. A flicker. We were devoid of physical form for an eternity before, and will be devoid of a physical form for an eternity after. In the grand scale of the lifespan of Grud’s glorious cosmos, we might as well not have lived at all.”

  Pastor Elvene Mandt Carbonara had been the Senior Arch-Primate of the Eighth Church of Grud the Unforgiving, a religious sect quite popular in southern Euro-Cit. She was about forty, I think. Tall with sallow skin, a wide frame but a narrow head, a noticeably asymmetrical hairline and an unsettling under-bite. Not easy on the eye.

  But then neither am I, I know that. I wasn’t criticising her looks, just commenting.

  She’d go through months-long phases where she spoke solely in quotes from her church’s religious tracts and the rest of us were never sure whether she believed any of it, or she was just messing with us, or if it was a smokescreen for something else. That last one is most likely: she was scared, and talked non-stop to mask her fear.

  She’d been on Titan for over a year, but this was my first time working directly alongside her. I’d seen her many times, of course, but like most of the prisoners, I kept my distance whenever possible. One of those rules of prison life: steer clear of the ones who talk to themselves, or flinch at the invisible fairies buzzing around them, or claim to have invented a way to turn dirt into coffee... because crazy is contagious.

  So the Pastor generated an imperceptible force field around herself by constantly talking about the afterlife, and that kept her reasonably safe from the psychopaths.

  But it didn’t keep away those who were looking for some form of guidance. The ‘lost souls’ who seem to be destined to stand behind more eloquent people while angrily shouting, “Yeah!” and waving their fists in the air.

  We were out in the Bronze, one-forty-something kilometres west of the prison complex, and the Pastor’s latest diatribe had begun within minutes of sub-warden Kalai Takenaga telling her, “Carbonara, you’re with Dredd. He’ll show you the ropes. Dredd, go easy on her.”

  As we’d walked away from the bus, Carbonara stared down at her feet and muttered something with each step. I’d made the mistake of asking her what she was doing.

  “Blessing the footsteps. She who blesseth the steps of her feet shall forever walk upright and steady in the house of Grud. Colonials, chapter twelve, verse six. Have you been saved, Rico Dredd?”

  I declined to answer, and that was when she hit me with the piece about dwelling in darkness.

  I didn’t want to get drawn into any kind of argument or debate. I said, “See all these loose rocks? See those two wheelbarrows? You take one of the barrows, I don’t care which. If you see any rocks with a silver streak through them, or silver speckles”—I reached down and scooped up a fist-sized rock—“Like this? See? You find rocks like this, anything from the size of your thumb upwards, you put them into your barrow.”

  She nodded, but it was more of a bow, her environment suit bending slightly at the hips rather than the neck. “Collect the ones with the silver. Got it. And then?”

  “And then you keep going until your barrow is almost too heavy to push, and then you push it back towards the truck. The crew there will empty it for you, and then you come back here with the empty barrow and repeat the process until you run out of rocks or the sub-warden tells us it’s time to quit. When we’ve picked this area clean, we come back with diggers and sieves. Got to get eve
ry molecule of iridium.”

  Pastor Carbonara looked down at her gloved hands. “These hands were designed for clasping in prayer, not picking up rocks. These are blessed hands, holy instruments of the all-strong Grud who shall—”

  “I don’t care how magic you think your hands are. You ordered the murders of eighty-two former members of your cult, so now you get to pick up rocks. Believe me, this is one of the easiest jobs on this whole damn moon, so my advice is you shut up and get to work.”

  She raised her head and glared at me through her tinted visor. “There is a special booth in Hell’s foetid diner reserved for the likes of you, Rico Dredd. The sins of the wicked are a deposit in the bank of hell, and their reward is a hefty dividend of unbearable torment every day, forever. So it is written in the letter from Saint Brenda to the Pomeranians.”

  “Just go pick up the damn rocks!”

  Sub-warden Takenaga called over to me, “Trouble, Dredd?”

  “Not yet,” I called back. “Any chance I can trade partners?”

  “Take a guess.”

  Within half an hour of working alongside Pastor Carbonara, I could have happily killed her. After another half-hour, I would have been just as happy for her to kill me.

  I had known others who talked as much: Cadet Wagner had been a chatterbox, as had Elemeno Pea, the first prisoner I got to know on Titan. But the Pastor was something else entirely. For four solid hours she methodically sorted through the rocks and scree and did a damn good job of it, but she did not once stop talking about her church, about Grud, about sinners.

  We’d been assigned a thirty-metre-square area to clear, so I couldn’t move far enough away to be completely out of earshot, but I noticed that the inmates working around us seemed to be keeping to the far sides of their patches.

  I’d no choice but to try to tune out her rhetoric and let it wash over me.

  You don’t argue with a crazy Grud-botherer because they train for that. You can’t fast-track to the end of their sermon by pretending to agree with them because they have an inexhaustible supply of fresh diatribes lined up and ready to go. And you certainly don’t ask a religious nut, “What do you mean, exactly?” because they will tell you.

  In the Academy of Law back in Mega-City One we were taught how to remain calm under pressure. A vital skill for a Judge, and handy for inmates, it turns out. I was able to ignore Pastor Elvene Mandt Carbonara, to mentally turn her volume down from eleven to about one or two and just ride it out.

  But not every prisoner had that skill. Many of them had never been Judges, or they were out of practice.

  Over time, some of them began to listen to what she had to say.

  She was a charismatic, imaginative, intelligent, very persuasive spiritual crackpot sentenced to life on a half-frozen moon with a little over two hundred of the toughest, most dangerous people who ever walked the Earth.

  Any fool should have been able to see that this was not a match made in Heaven.

  Chapter One

  AFTER KELLAN WIGHTMAN died, there was a small-scale power-vacuum in the prison’s hierarchy. Every group of people quickly develops a recognisable, and reasonably stable social structure. People are naturally—often unconsciously—channelled towards certain tasks. You might think that I’d always end up at the head of the table because of my skills and training and natural leadership abilities, but no; I tended to drift towards the edges. The lone wolf, if you like. The one who can do all those dirty jobs that everyone understands need to be done, but don’t want to do themselves.

  Wightman had been retraining as a Tek-Judge before they caught him. He’d been good at making things, and shortly after he arrived on Titan, he started applying his technical skills towards that Philosopher’s Stone of prison alchemy: turning vegetable matter into alcohol.

  He’d been successful, too. Not only at making the stuff, but at the harder task of keeping it hidden from the guards.

  So when Wightman died in 2084—under tragic but understandable circumstances—there was no one left with anywhere near his skill with fermentation.

  Before Wightman’s stashes ran dry, six or seven different teams had begun work on duplicating his processes. They who control the contraband control the prison, it’s said. Some of them already had some experience, or enough to get started. Not that it’s hard to turn sugar into alcohol: the hard part is doing it safely, in sufficient quantities to be worth the trouble, without being detected.

  It took almost eight months before the first truly successful non-Wightman batch of hooch was delivered. Melissa Parenteau, former Texas-City paramedic, had perfected her process and come up with a cheeky little onion-based brandy that was actually not bad at all.

  I couldn’t taste it much myself, what with my mouth being sewn up and having to imbibe it by pouring it in through the hole in my throat, but it had a pleasant afterglow and was less similar to engine-degreaser than the other teams’ attempts.

  Parenteau became the unofficial champion of the competition, her alcoholic concoctions highly prized... Until Benedict Ritter decided that he wanted a piece of the action. Ritter was ex-military, a very tough contender who’d been an inmate for over ten years. He was looking to set himself up as a supplier and figured that Parenteau would be easy to oust. She’d only been a paramedic, after all, and he’d been in the Marines, one of the first wave to land on Apostasy. Toughest of the tough.

  So Ritter tried to muscle in on Parenteau, and she threw half a litre of eighty-per-cent-proof alcohol in his face and set it alight. Allegedly, anyway; certainly, something burned away the lower half of Ritter’s face, and he never went anywhere near Parenteau again.

  Everyone left Parenteau alone after that. For the next few years, she was the prison’s chief supplier of booze. She mastered fermentation and distillation, and there was even a story going around that the wardens knew what she was doing but let it slide because her stuff was better than anything they could smuggle in on the supply ships.

  But in 2088, Melissa Parenteau died, the victim of an attack by Vivean Kassir.

  It was a stupid death, really, and an avoidable one. Kassir was Southern Brennan’s second-in-command. Even though Brennan was so big that most of us were sure he had mutie genes in there somewhere, Kassir was his muscle. She followed his orders, relayed his messages and beat the stomm out of anyone who bothered him—or anyone she thought might be going to bother him one day. Anyone trying to get to Brennan had to go through Kassir. They were joined at the hip. Frequently, if all the rumours are to be believed.

  Parenteau died because Brennan decided he wanted in on the game. This wasn’t a bad thing in itself, because Brennan’s people controlled C and E blocks and had his own distillers, but Parenteau’s product was much better.

  But instead of talking to Kassir to thrash out the details, Parenteau had tried to negotiate directly with Southern Brennan.

  I don’t know exactly how that meeting went down, but my guess is that Kassir didn’t like being bypassed and decided to express her dissatisfaction using the medium of rock-hammer and saw-blade.

  Parenteau had been the only one who knew where all of her fermenting drums were hidden. Most of them were found over the following months—one of them was even found by the wardens, as we concluded one morning when almost all of the guards were nursing severe hangovers—but some of them remained elusive, partly because we didn’t really know how many she’d had.

  Almost a year after Parenteau’s death, a 208-litre oil-drum was discovered in the prison’s gardens, buried right at the end of the corn field, at pretty much the furthest possible location from the prison’s main building. It was so close to the edge of the dome that some of the taller prisoners weren’t able to stand upright at that point.

  And the two-inmate crew that found it were friends of mine: Ryan Hubble and Genoa Amin.

  I was working in the next field, tilling the dry soil while my own crew—Dustin “The Wind” Enigenburg and Rho Kenworth—took turns throwing
in handfuls of the dry chemical fertiliser that pretty much kept all of us alive on Titan.

  Kenworth saw Genoa Amin approaching and nudged me. “Rico.”

  I glanced in the direction she was looking, but not before checking to see if any of the guards or other inmates were watching. Two guards at the airlock leading to the main part of the prison. Two more over at the north end of the dome looking up: outside, overhead, two prisoners were clambering up the dome checking the sealant between the transparent plasteen panels and the girders. No one else paying us much attention.

  Genoa was walking steadily towards us, hands in front of her, pressing her right thumb into her left palm as though she was nursing a small wound. Any guard who was watching would think that was exactly what she was doing. It’s easy to fake certain kinds of minor ailment. They won’t get you taken off a shift, but they might earn you a five-minute break, or an excuse to talk to another prisoner.

  “Any of ye got a steripatch?” Genoa called, her strong Glaswegian accent absolutely unmistakeable.

  I passed my spade to Dustin and began to walk towards her. “I’ve got one. Is it bad?”

  She stopped in front of me, and I pretended to examine her wound. As softly as I could manage with my artificial voicebox, I asked, “What is it?”

  “We found an oil-drum. A big one. Rico, I think it was one of Parenteau’s.”

  I could feel a slight smile creeping across my lips. “Full?”

  “I think so. Gave it a tap and it sounds full. We started digging it clear, but it’s too heavy to lift. Hubble wants to roll it out, but I figure they’ll definitely notice that.”

  “You’re right.” I peeled the backing off a steri-patch. “Cover it up again. Leave a marker so we know exactly where it is. Our best approach is to take the booze out a few litres at a time.”