Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  Sloane had progressed from humming to singing: “...He dined with his cat, his horse, his rat and his poodle, used the last of the bread to mop up the noodles, and then served them all his mom’s apple strudel, this is the ballad of...”

  It had been a long time since I’d heard anyone singing with such contentment and satisfaction. And that—combined with the heady scent of the soap and the images my mind was conjuring up—began to awaken my long-dormant libido. It was expressing some interest in what I might find if I opened the door, but I’d had plenty of practice ignoring it.

  This wasn’t about the moment; it was a long-term strategy. I still had eleven years on my sentence, and favours owed by guards are the ultimate currency in a prison.

  So while I could have walked into that bathroom and very probably seduced Sloane—even with my cold grey skin and mutilated features, I reckon I stood a fairly good chance—it was far better in the long run not to.

  Now she knew she could trust me. We shared a secret. Added to her knowledge that coming to Huygens Base was my idea, Sloane was now in a position where she definitely regarded me as an asset to the prison.

  I was not like the other prisoners. Everyone knew that anyway, but this reinforced it. And suppose that Takenaga did notice that Sloane had showered? She’d ask questions, and that would inevitably lead to Sloane admitting that she’d left me alone while she showered, that she trusted me. That would also encourage Takenaga to believe that I could be trusted.

  With that thought, I rolled off the bed and resumed searching through the room. It would be so much better if Sloane emerged from the shower to discover that I’d not been idle.

  Perception is everything, after all. If I wanted the guards to see me as being closer to them than to the rest of the prisoners, I had to give them so much evidence they couldn’t ignore it.

  So I moved on to the next room, another eight-bunk dormitory. I was halfway through the fourth footlocker when I became aware of how much time had passed—certainly more than ten minutes—so I returned to the master sergeant’s quarters where the bathroom door was still closed, and I could hear the water still running.

  I knocked gently on the door. “C’mon, Ms Sloane. I know it’s tempting, but you can’t stay in there forever.”

  The water shut off, and there was a deep sigh. “Okay... Give me a couple more minutes.”

  I returned to the next dormitory, and was almost done searching it before Sloane returned, still readjusting her environment suit.

  She seemed a lot happier than before. Her hair was still wet, but she looked fresh, cheerful, more relaxed. “Sorry... Look, Rico, there’s still some time if you make it real quick. The others—”

  “It’s fine,” I said, doing my best to smile without being too creepy. “It’ll be my turn next time, right? Besides, I have to be more careful in a shower, with my cybernetics. Don’t want to have to explain a short circuit.” I gestured towards the bunk closest to the door. “This room’s spoils. Eighteen and a half ration bars, jar of instant synthi-caf, four candy bars, half a bag of walnuts—real ones, I think—and what looks like a tube of crawbies. Ms Takenaga said we should gather up any drugs we find, but I’m sure she meant prescription medicines, not actual illegal narcotics. Should we dump them?”

  She hesitated. “No. Crawbies are an opioid, right? We might need them at some point for an anaesthetic.” She tossed me an empty backpack. “Not a bad haul, though. Every mouthful is another day a prisoner gets to live.”

  IT TOOK US almost an entire twenty-four-hour day to sweep the base of all edible products, and the last step was the hangar. Kurya and Brennan had scoured it, but they hadn’t been able to get inside the small, unmarked military-grade ship that had been sitting patiently for five years.

  Now, all five of us clustered around it, looking up.

  Brennan said, “If we could crack the entry codes, we could fly back to the prison. Get there in twenty minutes instead of six hours.”

  “Someone would still have to drive the bus back,” I said.

  Takenaga circled the ship for the eighth time. “There must be some emergency rations on board. That’s how the military works: there are rules for everything, and a ship this size would definitely have a survival pack. Might not be much, but it’s worth a look.”

  “Except that we can’t get in,” Sloane said. “We’ve been gone too long already. We should get back.”

  Takenaga said, “All right. Yeah, we’ll do that.” After a last look up at Colonel D’Angelo’s ship, she walked away.

  Southern Brennan lingered, silently staring at the ship. Even when Takenaga ordered him to follow the rest of us, he backed away rather than turn his back on the ship.

  When he reached the door, he said, “Leave me.”

  We all stopped and turned around to look at him.

  He was still staring at the Colonel D’Angelo’s ship. “Leave me. Maybe I’ll find a way to get inside it. Probably won’t. Either way, you’re better off. You know that.” He glanced back at me. “Tell them, Dredd.”

  I said, “Brennan, you’ll starve long before you get that ship open.”

  “Maybe the hunger will sharpen my wits.” He grinned. “Desperation begets invention, right?”

  Takenaga said, “We’re not leaving you, Brennan. How would that look? We leave a prisoner alone on a military base that probably still has weapons stored away somewhere and definitely has an escape craft? Yeah, the warden would love that.”

  He turned to her. “Then do me a favour. Shoot me in the drokkin’ head and leave me to rot. I’ve seen what starvation can do to people. I am not going out that way.”

  Sloane and Takenaga exchanged a glance, then Sloane said, “If they wanted you to have a quick death, they wouldn’t have sent you to Titan. You haven’t earned that privilege.”

  He snorted. “Right. What do I have to do to earn it? Attack you so that you’ve got no choice but to kill me?”

  “You can help us load the supplies back onto the bus, that’d be a start. Do that, and I promise you that we won’t let you starve.”

  Whatever he was thinking then, I don’t know, but after a second he straightened up, turned away from the craft and strode out.

  He didn’t look at me as he passed me. I knew then that whatever happened, he would never really be able to look me in the eye again, because we knew. We all knew. In that moment, when he’d asked the guards to leave him behind, Brennan had torn open the veil that had always shielded his true self from the rest of the world. And that’s a tear that can never be mended.

  IN OUR EXHAUSTING, day-long search-and-plunder of Huygens Base we recovered enough supplies, we calculated, to feed every guard and inmate for almost another month, as long as each of them only consumed the bare minimum to stay alive.

  It still wasn’t going to be enough.

  The journey back was toughest on Sloane: the rest of us could sleep, but even though she had the bus on autodrive, she had to remain at least partially alert.

  I woke up at one stage, maybe four hours into the journey, and quietly asked Sloane how she was doing. She said she was okay, but she did seem to appreciate being asked.

  As I returned to my seat, I saw Southern Brennan watching me. He beckoned me closer, then said, “Playing the long game, Dredd, huh? Curry favour with the guards. Get them on your side. I get that.” Maybe it was because I really knew him now, but his voice seemed softer than before, his manner less antagonistic.

  “How long have you got?” he asked.

  “Eleven more years.”

  He nodded slowly. “Eleven. They’re not going to break you. I see that now. You’ll do your time, and they’ll let you go.” He leaned to the left, looking past me towards Takenaga and Sloane. “I’m never getting off this rock. The things I’ve done... There’s no place for me back home. You and me and Kurya... We’re all here because we tried to live by our own rules, not theirs, and that doesn’t work. It’s like trying to change the course of a glacier
by pissin’ on it.” He glanced down my feet, then raised his head slowly, smoothly, as though he was a mechanical scanner taking in everything. “I could crush your skull between my fists. I could kill the guards. All of them. I could kill every drokker in the prison, but what would I gain from that?”

  “Not much.”

  “That ship back there... That was it for me.”

  I understood what he meant. In life, whatever your ambition, you look at all the obstacles and possibilities and you deal with them or discard them appropriately. One by one, you learn which aspects or elements to ignore and which to embrace in order to get you closer to your goal.

  But sometimes you reach a point where you can’t avoid the fact that you’re not going to win, regardless of what you do. It’s not a matter of defeat or surrender, but of acceptance. Of understanding that you can’t always get what you want.

  Brennan had had his moment of clarity. He knew now that “the system” was bigger and stronger than he was. Fighting it was futile.

  I shrugged, because I didn’t know what else to do, and sat down. Brennan was right about me, though. I was playing the long game. Not fighting against the system, but riding it. Steering it.

  I knew that some of the other inmates despised me for generally being respectful to our jailers, but it made sense. Sure, I could have fought them every step of the way, but what good would it have done me? It’s not like inmates can earn ‘Belligerence Points’ that they can later trade in for an upgrade in accommodations. I understood that there was no way off Titan other than to get to the end of my sentence and be released. What sort of an idiot would I have to be to jeopardise that?

  Well, I guess, the sort of idiot who generally populates prisons. I’ve seen inmates attack guards solely on the suspicion that another prisoner was given real margarine for his toast, or because someone took possession of the basketball by “deliberately being clever.” Sub-warden Martin Copus once almost had his eyes gouged out by a prisoner who thought that all blue-eyed people were in league with Satan. The prisoner in question had blue eyes himself, but was incapable of grasping the contradiction. More than once, inmates have set fire to their own cells as a protest for being forced to live in a cell: clearly, some people just don’t understand the concept of prison.

  So, yes, I was playing the long game. And the rules were simple: treat the guards with respect, because they’re the ones who are interviewed by the parole board to find out whether we’re fit to return to society.

  Plus the guards are people. Citizens. Law-enforcement officers of a sort, true, but still people. Despite my incarceration, I still believed in justice. Still do to this day. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the quest for justice is my driving force. It’s what keeps me going.

  Did I break the law? Yes, no doubt about it. Was it fair that I was incarcerated because of it? That’s not so simple to answer. If you’re on the edge of a lake and you see a child out in the water in the process of drowning, but there’s a No Swimming sign, what do you do? Let the kid drown because you don’t want to break the rule? No, you swim out and save the kid. Of course you do.

  Same with me. I’d been able to see how far Mega-City One was falling, and I’d tried to save it. I’d had to break some laws to do that, but what else was I supposed to do? Stand by and watch my city crumble and then shrug and say, “Well, I could have saved everyone but, you know, rules are rules”? Drokk that. And drokk anyone who says I’m wrong.

  Judges exist to guide the people, not rule them. Same with the prison guards. It’s a city in microcosm, with the guards as Judges and the inmates as the citizens. It’s the citizens’ duty to obey the rules as long as those rules are fair and safe. Anything else is just a hissy fit.

  I drifted off to sleep again, but I wasn’t out long before I was disturbed by the rocking of my seat. I opened my eyes to see Takenaga making her way to the front, pulling herself along by grabbing onto the seat-backs.

  She asked Sloane, “What is it?”

  “We’re forty minutes out, give or take. Can’t raise them on the radio.”

  “Is that—?”

  “They know we’re out here. They should certainly be listening.”

  Takenaga looked around slowly, pursing her lips. “That’s not a good sign. How long before we’re in visual range?”

  “Twenty-eight minutes we should be able to see the comms tower. Three minutes after that, the top of the... well, no, not any more. I was going to say that we’d see the top of the dome over the gardens, but that’s gone now.”

  I sat up, climbed out of my seat. “Take us in slow. Keep listening, keep your eyes open.”

  Takenaga said, “You don’t give orders, Dredd. Sit back down.”

  “Were you ever a Judge? No. I was. I’ve trained for situations like this.” I nodded ahead. “Something’s happened, something bad. Check the radio, Ms Sloane. Scan the channels and keep scanning until you get a signal.”

  Sloane said, “No need to be paranoid about it. Until we know for certain what’s happening, we have to assume that all is well.”

  “The evidence is already telling us that all is not well,” I said. “If comms are down, that means something is jamming the signals, right? At the very least you should be able to communicate directly with the other guards’ radios.”

  Cautiously, Takenaga said, “This is just speculation, but suppose we triggered an alarm at the base and the same people behind Colonel D’Angelo’s operation decided to pay the prison a visit?”

  Sloane rolled her eyes. “That is just speculation, and it doesn’t help anyone.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then... get as close as you can without anyone at the prison being able to see us. I’ll go out there, scout the area, report back.”

  “Not alone,” Takenaga said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’d slow me down. I don’t need an environment suit out there: I can run, hide, whatever. Plus, I’ve logged more time outside the prison than everyone on this bus combined.”

  Both Sloane and Takenaga were looking at me now, so I gave them my best lips-sewn-together smile. “Trust me.”

  Chapter Eight

  WE TOOK A wide arc around the prison so we could approach it from the west, where the Potamia Mesa allowed us to get a little over half a kilometre away without being seen.

  As I prepared to pass through the bus’s airlock, Takenaga said, “As soon as you know for certain what’s happening, you come back, agreed?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “You have one hour, Rico. And you’re not getting a gun,” Sloane added.

  I actually felt a little insulted by the implication that I’d be dumb enough to ask, but I held it in. Sloane and I had shared a moment back at Huygens and I didn’t want to shatter that so soon. So I smiled as though it had been a joke and said, “I know better than to ask.”

  I kept close to the wall of the mesa as I skirted around it. If something serious had happened at the prison—something other than a comms failure, which was just about the only safe explanation I could think of—then it might not be a bad thing for me. Rush in, save the day, Governor Dodge is so grateful he commutes the rest of my sentence.

  I knew that wasn’t going to happen, but, well, daydreams are free and mostly harmless, so I decided that Dodge would not only free me, he’d give me a medal and a million credits.

  Then I reached the side of the mesa and ahead of me was nothing but open ground and the prison itself. I’d never really seen it from this angle. Or rather, I’d seen it—many times—but I’d never really looked. It was innocuous. To the casual observer I’m sure it looks no different from any other mining plant: a fenced compound containing living quarters, admin blocks, two foundries, assorted outhouses, hangars and workshops of varying sizes.

  Unfortunately for me, there was no wall on this side, just the fence, even though everyone calls it The Wall. A fence is easier to climb, but you can’t see through a wall. If an inmate should escape, it’
s important for the guards to be able to see which way the inmate is going, so that they can pick them up later. It’s not like there’s anywhere on Titan to escape to. Aside from Huygens Base, that is, but then almost no one knew about that.

  My first friend on Titan was Elemeno Pea, and he once asked sub-warden Siebert, “Hypothetically, if a non-mod prisoner ran for the fence, scaled it, and kept going, how long would you wait until you went after him? If he has a twelve-hour O2 tank, would you wait, say, eleven hours and thirty minutes, so that he has no choice but to return with you? If it was a really old prisoner, would you even bother going after him at all? I guess you’d want the equipment back so you’d have to go find any escaper eventually, right? Track down his GPS implant and, bam, stun-shot to the back of the head. Or, no, wait, maybe you fire a warning shot first and then he stops, and then you make him walk back because that’ll be tough going and it’ll be a lesson he won’t forget.”

  Siebert’s response had been to tell Pea to shut the drokk up and get back to work.

  There was no sign of life from the prison: no activity, no vehicles, no patrols. Nothing but the usual wisps of smoke from the foundry chimneys, which didn’t tell me much since the furnaces would take days to burn themselves out.

  If nothing was happening, that meant no one was watching. I could safely emerge from the shadow of the mesa and walk towards the prison.

  Still, I felt extremely exposed and vulnerable as I stepped out and began to walk, expecting a shot with every step.