Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

  After I’d covered a hundred metres and still wasn’t dead, I broke into a run. My artificial lungs struggled to keep up as they pulled water vapour from the air and stripped the hydrogen atoms from it, and I was sure I was pushing them beyond their limits, but this was important. If I ruptured one of the lungs, I could always get another one—or they could put my original lungs back, that would be nice. Over the years, I’ve had many dreams about waking up to find that the surgery has been reversed and I look human again.

  I like those dreams... but they’re always followed by the crushing disappointment of reality.

  Ahead of me, the four-metre-high fence stretched out on each side without a break. It wasn’t electrified, so it was theoretically climbable, but the engineer who’d designed it had been a sneaky drokker: the fence was deliberately loosely strung between posts, making it swing and dip and sway as you climbed. Worse, it was topped with coils of razor-wire and, believe me, that stuff is not something you want to mess with. Guildford used to call it ‘The Pubes of the Giant Robot Devil.’

  Titan’s gravity is very low, only about a seventh of Earth’s, so an olympic-standard athlete would have a good chance of clearing four metres, but it was too risky for me to try. I veered left, heading towards the south gates.

  As I ran, I formulated a plan for getting past the gates. They were just as high as the fence, but lacked the razor wire, and were taut enough to make climbing relatively simple. And if that didn’t look like a viable option, there was always the possibility of going under the gate. I’m sure that when the gates were built, their lower edge swept the ground with only a couple of millimetres’ clearance, but decades of ore-carrying trucks had gouged deep ruts in the ground. It would be a tight squeeze, but I was pretty sure it was possible.

  But it turned out that no such plans were necessary, because the gates were open. Definitely not an indicator that all was well.

  And just inside the compound, lying on his side in the shadow of one of the admin buildings, was a prisoner I recognised as Jamison Yardley, a notorious counterfeiter who’d finally been caught attempting to grow cloned human eyeballs to fool retinal scanners.

  It was hard to tell through his environment suit’s visor whether he was unconscious or dead, so I decided to assume the former.

  The outer door of the tiny airlock to the admin building was open: I hauled Yardley to his feet and pushed him inside, squeezed in behind him and ran the air-cycle. When the inner door swung open, I carried him through to the office and lowered him on an uncluttered patch of floor.

  I removed his helmet and checked his pulse. Strong and steady. There was a scuff-mark on the back of the helmet close to the seal, and a corresponding bump on the back of Yardley’s neck. Hit from behind, probably didn’t see it coming.

  I tapped his face a couple of times. “Yardley? Yardley, it’s Dredd. You awake?”

  No response, so there was nothing I could do for him right now, and nothing he could do for me. I put his helmet back on, loosely, and straightened up.

  I had only been inside this building—the loading bay—once, and that had been several years earlier. The outgoing iridium ingots were logged through here once a year when the supply ship came. There was a large antique mechanical scales next to a state-of-the-art electronic mass-evaluator—which even for a prison mine shows a lack of trust—and half a dozen paper ledgers. For the same reason, I guess. You can’t remotely hack a sheet of paper.

  Out of curiosity, and knowing that I’d probably never get another chance, I opened one of the ledgers at the last page. 2085 Total Yield: Iridium 10,008.62 tonnes. Iron 461.3 tonnes. Nickel 295.8 tonnes. Gold 324.5 kilogrammes. A lot more like that. Interesting information to a geologist, I guess, but useless to me.

  A door at the rear of the office led to the loading bay itself, a large warehouse with a sliding roof. The door was unlocked, and there in front of me was enough iridium to buy a continent. Two dozen pallets stacked high with crudely-formed ingots, the fruit of half a year’s labour by me and my fellow inmates.

  But I wasn’t interested in that. I ignored incalculable riches as I ran through the loading bay to the exit on the opposite side, leading to the guards’ quarters. There, I was sure, I’d find some answers.

  THE DOOR BETWEEN the loading bay and the guards’ quarters wasn’t locked, but it was bolted from the other side, which was worse. Locks, I can pick; opening a slide-bolt from the wrong side requires a giant magnet or telekinesis or a hefty bribe.

  I pressed my face close to the small square window set into the door and tried to see in, but the quarters were in almost complete darkness, certainly a lot darker than the storehouse.

  It was only as my forehead touched the glass that I realised my mistake: I was now blocking the square shaft of light spilling into the darkened room. Anyone inside could hardly fail to notice that.

  I was about to move away when I saw something move. A brief glint of light on metal.

  And then I was staring down the barrel of a guard’s gun, not more than five centimetres away from my face.

  A muffled voice said, “Back up, Dredd. Slowly. I want to see empty hands.”

  I took four steps backwards and raised my hands, palms out. “I’m unarmed.” That wasn’t true, of course. I still had the 2mm Kolibri replica tucked into my right boot. I figured it’d remain hidden as long as there was only one person on the other side of the door. Two or more and I might be in trouble, but one person wouldn’t be able to frisk me properly and hold a gun on me at the same time.

  There was a shunkk as the bolt slid back, then the door was pulled open.

  Sub-warden Giambalvo’s voice said, “Walk in, Dredd. Eight steps. Slowly. Keep your hands raised. Try anything and I’ll lighten my gun. Understood?”

  “Got it.”

  “Just you?”

  “Just me.”

  I stepped through the doorway. The door was closed and re-bolted behind me as I took my eighth step, and after a few seconds my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I slowly turned around to see Giambalvo standing with her back to the door, holding the gun on me with both hands. The tip of the barrel was trembling. Never a good sign.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked.

  “I was about to ask the same thing.”

  “You and the others took off in the bus—I’m guessing you went out to Huygens Base—but now you come back without the others. You tell me they’re okay, or I swear to Grud I’ll—”

  “They’re all fine,” I said. “I give you my word.” I looked around properly for the first time. We were in the common area of the guards’ quarters. Doors on either side led to dormitories, and behind me was a passage to the kitchen. “Are we alone here?”

  Her eyes narrowed even further, and her grip on the gun tightened. “Why?”

  I chose to take that to mean, “Yes,” and said, “Because the fewer of us who know about Huygens, the better.” I dragged a chair over and dropped into it. “Sloane couldn’t make radio contact as we approached, so I came out alone to see what’s happened.”

  She sagged then, a combination of relief and exhaustion. “Thank Grud... Are they willing to help us?”

  I hesitated. “They...? No. The base has been abandoned ever since the incident with Colonel D’Angelo and his people.” I looked around the darkened room again. “So... We were gone less than two days. What did we miss?”

  “IT WAS YOUR fault, Rico,” Giambalvo said as she spread an old paper map of the prison across a desk in her office. “Word started to spread that you and Southern Brennan escaped. You took Takenaga and Sloane hostage. The inmates started talking, saying that if you two had broken out together, then the situation was worse than we were telling them.”

  “You’re blaming us for other people’s rumours?”

  She pointed at the map. “Right here. C-Block. There was a gathering. They were angry, getting hungry, most of them exhausted from a six-hour shift trying to clear up the gardens and salvage
pieces of the dome’s superstructure. They heard that you were gone and word started to spread that you’d taken all the remaining rations with you.”

  I swore. “Where the hell did they get that idea?”

  She glared at me. “Very few of the inmates here were arrested for an abundance of intelligence, Dredd. There was food, then you were gone and there was no food. Mob mentality filled in the gaps and created the conclusion they needed to riot. And that drokkin’ psycho Pastor Carbonara didn’t help matters one damn bit.” She nodded towards the desk’s monitor, which was showing a list of dates and times. “I pulled the security recordings earlier. Check it out. Third from the bottom. Quadrant two, camera four.”

  I poked at the workstation’s keyboard and after a second or two the screen flickered to show a high-angle view of the cross-junction in C-Block. Among the inmates milling around, I could see Pastor Carbonara shouting for attention.

  “Give it a few seconds for the sound to kick in,” Giambalvo said. “There’s always a lag. Don’t know why—we’ve never been able to iron that out.”

  I said, “It’s not a lag. It’s a feature. It’s—” Carbonara’s voice erupted from the monitor, and I hit the pause button. “There’s an option in the security software that allows you to view the images in silence for a few seconds just in case you need to check on the camera feed without alerting everyone around you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was a Judge. We study security systems.” I tapped at the keyboard, calling up the software’s options page. “There: ‘DBS 25.’ That’s twenty-five seconds Delay Before Sound. I’d recommend setting the value to five. Any less than that and you’re taking a risk if you ever do need to surreptitiously check the cameras.” I closed the options page, and stared at the still image of the inmates in C-Block. “So what am I going to hear?”

  “Watch for yourself.”

  I hit play and the image unfroze. It played in silence again. Most of the inmates weren’t paying any attention to Carbonara, but her usual entourage was behind her. One of them found a plastic crate, dropped it upside-down on the ground in front of Carbonara. She stepped on it and resumed shouting just as the sound kicked back in.

  “The Almighty Grud has delivered unto us the challenge of the empty larder, and to you, my children, I say that we are duty-bound to meet this challenge head-on. We should rejoice in this misfortune, celebrate these difficult times to come. We should wallow in the happy knowledge that Grud has deigned us worthy of suffering this hardship. It is only through adversity that we will be cleansed and purified and thoroughly shaken down and thus judged fit to enter into Grud’s sacred chambers of holy blessed worthiness. Can I get an Amen?”

  A woman in the crowd nearby replied, “No, yeh can’t. Go peddle yer sanctified stomm somewhere else, Carbonara.”

  I smiled at that: Genoa Amin, my favourite of all the inmates.

  One of the pastor’s acolytes—Sven “Fawn” Svendsen, a former tutor at the Megaheim Law Academy—politely asked Genoa to move along, and made the mistake of putting his hand on her arm.

  Svendsen wouldn’t be using that hand again for a long time.

  The fight broke out almost instantly. I’d seen it happen before, first-hand, both here on Titan and on the streets of Mega-City One. Sometimes all it takes is for one person to clear their throat in the wrong way at the wrong time, and suddenly the air is filled with fists and screams.

  The first groin had barely been kicked before four of Carbonara’s followers dragged her away from the fighting. The rest of the acolytes—a good sixteen or seventeen, by my estimation—swarmed into the crowd with swinging fists and butting heads.

  Though smaller and lighter than most of the inmates, Genoa fought like a dervish. I was aware of her reputation, but I’d never really seen her in action before.

  She elbowed Yves Venti in the throat, and as he stumbled backwards, leapt onto him and used his body as a platform to launch herself towards Billy-Joe Bungalow, a knuckle-dragging bruiser with a penchant for strangling his victims with their own relatives’ intestines.

  Bungalow saw her coming and lashed out at her, a powerful backhand to swat her away. But Genoa latched onto his arm and wrapped herself around it. Unbalanced, Bungalow staggered into Peta Rosenberg just as she was in the process of pummelling Hugo Boylan with his own cybernetic arm.

  Rosenberg lashed out at Bungalow and Genoa rolled neatly to the ground, skidded past Boylan—giving him a totally unwarranted kick along the way—then leapt to her feet, vaulted over two prisoners who were either desperately trying to bear-hug each other to death or were taking advantage of the chaos to have a sneaky cuddle, and tucked herself into a ball just before crashing into the back of Deathwish Drogan’s knees.

  “Wow.”

  Next to me, Giambalvo said, “I know. I’ve watched that three times already. Two days ago she almost froze to death—and suffocated. She recovers fast.”

  Violence rippled through C-Block like a tidal wave, an irresistible force that swept up everyone and everything along with it.

  I flipped through the screens, camera to camera, watching as the fighting spilled out into B-Block. Everything not bolted to the floor became a weapon or a shield, often both. I swear I saw one prisoner attempt to attack another with a damp sponge.

  Watching the riot after the fact, via the remoteness of the security-cam playback, it was almost possible to be blasé about it, as I realised when I saw Sandrine Hornby throw a fire extinguisher at Philip Mehta and mentally awarded her only six points out of ten.

  But that changed when I saw Sorenta Teffer snatch sub-warden Henry’s sick-stick and zap him with it. As he collapsed, spewing vomit onto the ground, Teffer hit him again and again, over and over until long after the spasms stopped and his twitching body was ejecting nothing but blood from every orifice.

  I hit the pause button again, and turned to Giambalvo. “All right. What’s the current status?”

  “As near as I can tell, at least seven guards and twenty-eight inmates are dead. Most of the cameras have been smashed or covered. Someone got into the comms control room and rigged the units to broadcast white noise on every wavelength. Until we can shut that down, no one’s getting a radio signal in or out—the comms system has its own batteries that’ll keep it running for a week, so even if we could get close enough to cut the power cable from outside, it wouldn’t do any good. Carbonara has her people holed up in D; they’ve taken possession of all our supplies and they’ve got two guards as hostages. One is definitely Aldrich, and I think the other is Mister Copus—that’s the only place he could be. Last time I saw them, they were running towards Carbonara’s people.”

  I said, “So they’re either dead or captured. Captured makes more sense; hostages are always better than corpses in a stand-off. Plus, if Copus was dead, they wouldn’t hide his body. They’d display it.”

  “As for Kassir and Sims,” Giambalvo continued, “near as I can tell they lost most of their crew. Now it’s just the two of them and a few hangers-on. But they got past security and into the generator.”

  “Aw, hell, no. That gives them control of the backup air-recycler, the AG and the power!”

  She nodded. “That’s the stand-off. And everyone else is in the middle. Freeze or starve. Or suffocate. Or die of thirst. We can’t get close enough to any of them to even begin negotiations. Frame, Doc Mollo and a couple of the others barricaded themselves in Governor Dodge’s office to protect him, but that backfired.”

  “Right: now they’re stuck in there,” I said. “So if I’ve counted correctly... Aside from Takenaga and Sloane out in the bus, you’re the only guard we know for certain who’s still free.”

  Giambalvo nodded again, and held up her gun. “And this is our only asset.”

  “Not any more. Now you have me.”

  Chapter Nine

  I NEEDED ALLIES, that much was obvious. Giambalvo couldn’t be one of them. A situation like that, if you’re running arou
nd with one of the guards, you deserve to get turned into paste.

  Most of the security cameras had been smashed or torn from the walls, but archive footage showed me that a little over seven hours ago, Genoa Amin had been hiding out in the med-centre.

  “You can’t get to her without being seen by Kassir’s people,” Giambalvo protested. “They’ve got the entrance to D- and E-Blocks staked out.”

  “I know a way.”

  “And what good will it do any of us if you can reach her, Dredd?”

  “She’s a good fighter. I’ll need people who can fight to get past Carbonara’s acolytes. Since you won’t give me a gun...”

  “Correct.”

  “I can do this,” I assured her, trying to sound confident. “I can take back control of the generator and the supplies.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Without killing everyone?”

  I nodded. “Without killing everyone.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.”

  THE LONG TUNNEL between the guards’ quarters and gen-pop was usually much better lit; I was grateful to whichever nameless convict had decided to smash most of the ceiling lights. Not an easy task, given that they were behind reinforced transparent plasteen.

  As it was, the tunnel was dark enough that I could make my way along it by sticking to the side and keeping to the shadows. Someone would have to be actively looking for movement to notice that I was there.

  As I reached the junction where the tunnel joined E-Block, I heard something scuff against the ground ahead of me.

  I dropped into a crouch. E-Block was in almost complete darkness. It seemed bigger, and much more dangerous, than it did in the light.

  I moved closer, my hand slipping towards my right boot. The Kolibri replica was still there, and I instantly regretted not test-firing it earlier, just to be sure that it actually worked. But the gun would have to be my last resort; it could become a starting gun for the inmates to resume rioting.