Then Zera Kurya said, “Tell that to Kellan Wightman.”
I turned away from her. That had been a low shot; mean. Not like Kurya at all. I figured maybe it was the hunger, and maybe fear of what the coming months would bring.
Brennan said, “Truth hurts, huh, Dredd? Yeah, she told me. For years we thought that Wightman was killed by a power-surge as you were trying to rescue the crew from the downed freighter. Now we know. You used him as a human shield.”
I kept my mouth shut as I turned back. It was clear he wasn’t finished and I wanted to see where he was going with this.
“Is that why you picked me for this duty? There’s not many prisoners left who are big enough for you to hide behind.” He took a step back and spat on the floor. “That’s you, Dredd. That’s your precious bloodline. Corrupt or insane, every one of you. Your brother is the one who put me away, did you know that? Judge Joseph Dredd, pride of Sector Thirteen. Even with all that crap on your face, I can see him in you. That same arrogance. But in you, it’s worse. He looks at everyone as though they’re a potential lawbreaker. You look at people as though they’re insects.”
I almost smiled. “Joe brought you in? Is that what you’re telling me? You got taken down by my little brother? Damn it, Brennan, you really are dumb. You don’t advertise your weaknesses, any idiot knows that. So that’s why you’ve had your sights on me all this time.” I stepped closer to him. “Joe beat you, and I was always better than him. Always. So if you’re no match for him, you’re not worth my sweat. Or did you forget that I scored the highest marks ever in the toughest academy on Earth?”
“We’re not on Earth now, Dredd.”
He was a metre in front of me. Within reach. A jab to the throat would knock him backwards, or bring him to his knees. Throat, eyes, genitals. Three hits and he’s down. I could kill him before he laid a single finger on me and I wouldn’t even bruise a knuckle.
Because sooner or later it was going to come down to that. One of us would conclude that the other was more useful dead than alive.
For a big guy, Brennan moved fast; faster than I’d anticipated. I almost didn’t see it coming: a single punch—more of a jab, really—straight out, square in the jaw.
In most cases I would have seen it coming, because to hit me hard enough to hurt, the average person would have to pull their arm back, pivot at the hip. I’d have time to avoid it or block it, or even retaliate first.
But Brennan was so strong that even a jab sent me staggering backwards. The back of my legs collided with a table that, like all the others, was bolted to the floor, and I would have fallen onto it if I hadn’t put my hands out behind me.
It wasn’t luck that my right hand landed on the edge of a large, toughened-plastic tray. I was a Judge: I’ve been trained to always evaluate every location. Exits, possible weapons, pitfalls, traps, etc. It all happens automatically, the moment I enter a room.
So while I might not have been conscious of that tray’s location, it had certainly been logged in my subconscious.
I grabbed hold of the tray and swung it up, grabbed the other side with my left hand. Out of pure Academy-honed reflex I had the tray in front of me like a shield just before Brennan’s second—and much more powerful—punch.
His fist slammed into the tough plastic tray hard enough to knock it out of my grip, but it gave me the time I needed to duck and roll away.
I continued the roll into a half-spinning kick, jamming the heel of my right boot into Brennan’s stomach. It felt like kicking a sack of wet sand, and it was only slightly more effective.
My spin brought me to the floor face-down, landing with my hands flat in front of me—as I’d planned. I instantly pushed myself up and to the side, just as Brennan brought his boot crashing down where my head had been.
I darted under another table and rolled to my feet, but I was barely upright when Brennan came lunging at me. It was a frantic, almost desperate scramble over the fixed tables and benches, but the gracelessness of the move would make no difference if he hit me: he was almost twice my weight, and all of it muscle.
So I dropped down again, his outstretched arms missed me by centimetres, and I squirmed back under the table, emerging close to Kurya.
Enraged as he was, I wasn’t a match for Southern Brennan. On any other day, sure, but not like this. But with Kurya backing me up, I knew I had a chance.
As I again jumped to my feet, I began, “You get his—”
She stepped away, barely looking at either of us. “Not my quarrel.”
I didn’t have time to respond to that: Brennan was already leaping at me again. He wasn’t concerned about crashing forehead-first into a table or smashing his knees on a bench; he wanted to hurt me, and it didn’t matter whether he got hurt in the process.
I couldn’t keep ducking under the tables forever: I had to do something.
So this time I stood my ground. He was angry, and anger makes people careless. His arms, outstretched and grabbing, would take that much longer to protect his midriff and groin.
A well-placed kick or punch would take the fight out of him.
All that passed through my head in an instant, along with the conclusion that he was actually coming at me too fast for my crude plan to work, and that I was at the wrong angle anyway. I jumped aside.
But I’d been hungry for most of the day, and I was exhausted. I’d already been caught in a fireball and had to dodge flaming chunks of plasteen roofing while carrying two people to safety. I wasn’t able to move fast enough.
Brennan’s left hand caught my upper left arm and locked on. As he crashed into another table—hard enough to loosen the bolts securing it to the floor—he dragged me with him. His powerful fingers dug into my arm; he squeezed so tight I swear I could almost feel the veins and arteries bursting.
He skidded across the top of the table and crashed down on the other side, still dragging me behind him.
The side of my head smacked against the edge of a bench as we went down, and it was only later that I realised how lucky I’d been: a couple of centimetres to the right and I’d have hit the corner, earning a fractured skull at the very least.
Half-dazed, I grabbed one of the table’s legs with my free arm and tried to pull myself away, but Brennan squirmed around and locked his free arm around my neck.
That was when sub-warden Takenaga shot him in the arm.
Chapter Six
IT WAS A stun-shot. I was disappointed about that at first, but later realised she’d made the right call. If she’d killed him, that would be one less person to help search the base and load whatever we found onto the bus.
As Takenaga and Sloane entered the mess hall—with the discharge hum of Takenaga’s side-arm still fading—they seemed almost calm about the fight, as though they’d been expecting it. Perhaps they had.
Takenaga told Kurya to check on Brennan, keeping her gun trained on him.
Sloane unzipped her environment suit halfway down and tied the top half around her waist as she looked around. “So. This place is smaller than I remembered.”
Kurya was crouched over Brennan. She looked up. “He’s alive.”
As I pulled myself to my feet, I began, “He attacked—”
Takenaga circled the table containing the crates and boxes of food. “I don’t care. Next time it happens, I’ll shoot both of you. And it won’t be a stun-shot. This is everything?”
I nodded. My left arm felt like the bone had been crushed to powder.
“And how much did you three eat?”
“Not much,” I said. “Check the garbage in the kitchen, you’ll see the packages.”
Takenaga scowled. “You should have had more control. Now you don’t eat again until tomorrow evening. Maybe the morning after. You’ve searched everywhere?”
Kurya said, “Just the common areas. We haven’t had time to go through every room.”
Sloane was poking through the crates, lifting out cans and frowning at them. “Then that’s our
next step. We take anything even remotely edible. Sauces, spices, toothpaste. Cosmetics. Anything made of leather or chalk or wax. That includes waxed paper. Pot plants. Any of the grunts here keep a pet? Find their food. Even if it’s a goldfish, their food is edible.”
When you’re absolutely starving, a fish-food and leather-belt salad doesn’t sound too bad. But Kurya, Brennan and I had eaten about three ration-packs each. We were now full and not in the mood for hunting down supplies of waxed paper and dog food.
Takenaga added, “Gather up any and all medical supplies, too. A lot of pills are made of sugar or starches. As long as we’re careful and watch for side-effects and overdoses, we should be okay.”
“What about ropes and cloth, if they’re made from natural fibres?” I asked.
Sloane shook her head. “Not going to be any good. Humans can’t effectively digest cellulose.”
Takenaga decided that we should split up into two teams and properly scour the base. When Brennan recovered, he, Kurya and Takenaga would start at the uppermost levels and work their way down.
Sloane and I headed for the lowest.
In a long-dead marine’s footlocker she found a small tub of hair gel and stuffed it into the backpack she was carrying.
“Hair gel?” I asked. “That’s edible?”
“This brand is mostly wax.” She reached into the footlocker again and pulled out a small bulky envelope, then emptied its contents onto the bed. Four small partly-used birthday-cake candles. “Also wax. Nice.” She added them to her backpack.
“How the hell do you know all this?”
“My grandpa was a survivalist nut. He raised me. We spent a lot of time in his bunker out in the woods.” She smiled. “He was one of those guys who picked their teeth with a six-inch hunting knife. Wrestled a bear every morning before breakfast—which was a bottle of whiskey—then shaved with a chisel. A blunt one. That kind of thing, you know?” She nodded towards the next footlocker. “You can listen and search at the same time, Dredd.”
“Right, sure.” I popped the lid on the locker. “Empty.” I moved on to the next one. It was packed with clothing that had obviously just been dumped back in after the last time it was searched, five years earlier. “Socks. Pants. Boots...”
“Leather?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Take them out anyway, I’ll check when I’m done here. Yeah, Gramps was a piece of work, all right. A bigot who despised anyone who wasn’t a white, straight, male, gun-owning Presbyterian. Ate almost nothing but meat and potatoes because he was convinced that green vegetables made you gay, drank like an alcoholic fish, never went to a doctor in case they might be Jewish or a woman, got into bar fights at least once a week... and somehow still lived to be ninety.”
I didn’t respond to that. I was staring at something I never thought I’d see outside of a museum. A small wooden box containing what looked like an antique 2mm Kolibri, one of the smallest handguns ever made. Keeping one eye on Sloane, I ran my fingers over the gun and raised them to my face. My sense of smell had never fully returned after the operation, but it was good enough to pick up the familiar tang of gun oil. Whoever had owned the Kolibri had taken care of it.
This can’t be the real thing, I said to myself. They’re too rare. Has to be a replica. But if it still works... The Kolibri held 2.7mm ammunition, not a common calibre. But the wooden box wasn’t engraved or otherwise marked; it wasn’t a display, for a collector’s item. The owner used this gun. Whoever had searched this locker last time we were here obviously missed it.
I continued searching, pulling out more socks and underwear, and then right in the corner, tucked away, was a small cloth-wrapped bundle.
Sloane was already straightening up, about to move on past me to the next locker, so I quickly shoved the gun and the bundle—which felt very much like it might contain a dozen or so rounds of the gun’s tiny ammunition—into a pair of thick socks.
“What have you got there?” Sloane asked.
“Socks. Look, I’m taking these. The guy who owned them is dead and—”
She shrugged. “I don’t care. Take all the socks, if you want. Don’t care if you go through his wallet, either. Just keep searching for things we can eat. Actually, if you do find a wallet, and it’s leather, keep it.”
The next room was clearly an officer’s quarters. A bunk resembling an actual bed, two more lockers, a door leading to a small bathroom.
Sloane looked around with an expression of disapproval. “Sparse.”
“For you, maybe,” I said. “I had a nice apartment in the Meg for a while, but even so, after nine years on this freezing rock and fifteen in the Academy of Law, this looks like luxury to me.” An idea struck me, but I brushed it away instantly.
That’s the way my brain works, sometimes. Ideas come and they’re often good ideas, but it’s not always the right time to act on them. Sometimes you have to dismiss the idea, no matter how perfect it seems, then if it keeps coming back, it might be worth some consideration.
Sloane opened the nearest of the upright lockers to reveal a perfectly-pressed and polished dress uniform. She glanced back at me. “You want to be a master sergeant, Dredd?”
“More than anything.”
She half-snorted and opened the next locker. It was lined with shelves containing neatly-folded clothes. “Must have overlooked this last time,” she said, a note of optimism in her voice. As she poked through the contents, she added, “Check the bathroom.”
I stepped around her and pushed the bathroom door open fully. Washbasin, small cabinet, toilet, small pedal bin, towel-rack, shower. There was nothing in the cabinet but a bar of soap and small plastic tumbler that might once have been used to keep a toothbrush upright, but I took them anyway. There was almost a full roll of paper next to the toilet. Not much good at allaying hunger, but I knew some of my fellow inmates would pay dearly for real, actual toilet paper. I stuffed that into my backpack too, and as I was reaching for the towels next to the shower, my dismissed idea came rushing back. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. I leaned back out through the door. “There’s a shower here.”
“I’ve seen one before.”
“Yeah, but this is a good one. Water recycler with purification and heating elements, very high-pressure. Looks like it’s almost never been used. There’s a lot of fresh towels, too.” I held up the bar of soap. “And this. Actual real soap, it looks like.”
Sloane dropped to her knees and began to rummage through the master sergeant’s collection of boots. “And...?”
“I haven’t had a real shower since I got to Titan. Neither have you, I’m guessing. I know the guard’s quarters aren’t much better than the cells.”
She stopped rummaging, then slowly looked up at me. “We’re on a schedule here.”
“Got to take a break sometime. Be honest, Ms Sloane, in a couple of months we’ll all be killing each other over the last scraps of half a leather shoe that someone’s been boiling for a week. If anyone clips a toenail, there’ll be a dozen people clustered around asking, ‘Are you planning to eat that?’ We are toppling over the edge of the abyss here and it’s a long, painful way down. I’d like to have at least a few nice memories to keep me company as I fall. Wouldn’t you?”
She straightened up, looking past me towards the bathroom. “Jovus...”
“You take a shower, then I’ll take one. No one else needs to know. Who am I gonna tell, anyway? And if I did, who’d believe me?”
Sloane shook her head, but she didn’t move away, or say anything. That’s when I knew I was getting through to her.
“You don’t think you can trust me, is that it?”
“Partly, yeah.”
“Phoebe... I mean, Ms Sloane... I could have attacked you at any time, you know that. I’m not a violent prisoner. What happened in the mess hall, that was Brennan attacking me. I mean, I’d have to be an idiot to attack him. You know that. Cuff me to the bed frame if you want to be sure.”
She glanced up at me. “No, I don’t think we need to go that far.”
“The others are on the other side of the base. They’ll never know. Take ten minutes for yourself. I mean, even if we survive this, how long have you got to serve?”
“Almost six years.”
“Six years. At one shower a day, that’s two thousand barely-warm, hurried showers before you get to go home and properly start your new life. Two thousand more mornings standing on cold, cracked tiles trying to quickly dry yourself with a paper-thin prison-issue towel.”
Sloane sighed. “Damn it... All right. You say nothing, Rico. Understood?”
“Sure, yeah.” I stepped aside, clearing the path to the small bathroom. “Ten minutes, then it’s my turn.”
“The others will notice we’re clean.”
“So? For all we know, they’re doing the same thing right now. It’s only logical. This is a harsh life, even for you guards; we’d be fools not to avail ourselves of every morsel of innocent pleasure that comes our way.”
Chapter Seven
I STRETCHED OUT on the Master Sergeant’s bed, face-down and propped up on my elbows, and when I was sure that Sloane was busy showering—I could hear her humming over the hiss of the water—I pulled the sock from my pocket and removed the Kolibri and the bundle of ammo.
A quick examination confirmed that the gun was not a real Kolibri. It looked close enough, but this one held a twelve-round magazine in the grip and the barrel appeared to be rifled. The tech required to construct it didn’t exist when they stopped making the weapon a hundred and fifty years earlier.
I popped the empty magazine out and sniffed the chamber. Maybe there was the faintest trace of cordite, but it had been at least five years since anyone had even handled the gun, let alone fired it. Then I checked the ammunition: twelve rounds that fit the magazine perfectly.
I clipped it back into place, and tucked the gun into the side of my boot. That felt familiar, and brought back a rush of memories of my days on the streets of Mega-City One. The Judge’s boot-holster: looks like exactly the wrong place to keep your gun, but with enough training a Judge can draw from it just as quickly as from any other holster, and has the advantage that it forces the Judge to crouch, making them a smaller target. Critics will say, “Yeah, but it’s not much good if you’re running after a perp!” but a good Judge should have their Lawgiver already drawn before the pursuit begins.
Rico Dredd: The Titan Years Page 26