Rico Dredd: The Titan Years Page 12

  No one could think of anything to say after that.

  Two

  KELLAN WIGHTMAN CAUGHT up with me after the shift, as I was making my way back towards my cell.

  “What was that about?” he asked, gesturing back towards the way he’d come. “Takenaga got a message on her datapad and muttered, ‘Aw crap.’ And then she just walked away.”

  “Since I wasn’t there, I obviously have no idea,” I said.

  If Kalai Takenaga had been supervising him, that probably meant that Wightman had been on machine maintenance again. He usually griped about that, but I knew he secretly enjoyed it. Tinkering with an engine was a great way to lose yourself for a few hours.

  Wightman was like me, a mod. A bulky man, taller than me and impressively strong. He sported a thick beard—now flecked with grey—in a futile attempt to hide the cybernetic modifications to his face. Wightman was coming to the end of his fifteenth year, almost half his sentence behind him, which was something he managed to bring up at every opportunity. “Two weeks from Wednesday and I’m over the crest of the hill,” he said. “Fifteen whole years in this crap-cluster, can you believe that, Rico?”

  “I’ve got seventeen to go, so, yeah.” But I couldn’t resent Wightman’s buoyancy. Fifteen years without a shiv in the back was something of an achievement.

  “We are gonna get absolutely stomm-faced,” he said. “The stuff’s been fermenting nicely. It should be pretty powerful. Probably tastes like what it is—rotten vegetables—but I don’t care.”

  “Not for me,” I said. “But knock yourself out. Which you probably will.”

  Wightman lowered his voice a little as we passed two anxious-looking guards. “We’re not Judges any more, Rico. You can let go of the good-little-angel act.”

  Wightman had been on the job in Mega-City Two for eight years before he was arrested for setting fires in city blocks and then fabricating evidence to frame the Californian Secessionists. “Just a moment of madness,” he’d said, the first time he talked to me about it. “Damn Fornies were causing so much trouble, something had to be done. It’s not like I murdered anyone.”

  His ‘moment of madness’ had led him to torch seven city blocks, with damage estimated at the best part of half a billion credits. It was a wonder they hadn’t executed him, and an absolute miracle more people hadn’t died.

  The only reason he got caught was because he’d always taken great care to ensure that each block’s alarm systems were fully functioning to make sure that everyone go out before the fire really took hold. But on that seventh block the alarms worked fine for the first minute, then abruptly shut off. By that stage it was too late to quench the fire. Wightman risked his own life getting everyone out. Four of them later died due to severe smoke inhalation.

  I’m not saying that getting all those people out makes him a hero—I mean, he’d started the damn fires himself—but he wasn’t technically a murderer.

  Wightman had settled into prison life neatly. He quickly became the prison’s chief booze-hound. He knew alcohol inside and out, and there was a running joke that the guy could ferment a sack. He had the advantage that most of the other prisoners were Judges with little experience of real alcohol, so even a thimbleful of the hard stuff was enough to get them swaying.

  “You’ll like the latest batch,” he said. “Grapefruit wine. It’s been ready for weeks, but this is a celebration, so I want it to be something special. Fermentation can only get you so far. Now I’m looking into distillation.”

  “There is no way you can build a still and not have the guards find it,” I said.

  “Don’t need to. Distillation is just separating the alcohol from the water, right? Don’t need to evaporate the stuff to do that. The freezing point of alcohol is negative one hundred fourteen degrees. So I’ll drop the temperature to about negative eight”—Wightman’s sewn-up lips formed into a rudimentary smile—“the water freezes, but the alcohol doesn’t. Then I’ll just take out the ice.”

  That sounded right, but I still didn’t want to get involved.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid of reprisals: I just wasn’t interested in getting drunk. It was important that I kept my head clear. Most of the time the prison was peaceful, but that was only because ninety per cent of the prisoners were biding their time before they made whatever moves they felt were vital to their own well-being.

  Fights could, and did, break out seemingly spontaneously, but luckily few of them descended into full-scale riots: that was when this place got really dangerous.

  The unspoken prison hierarchy would be upset for a day or two, then settle down again. The big storm disaster that led to me becoming a mod had wiped out the prison’s most sadistic guards and some of the worst of the prisoners, but the power vacuum was filled in a matter of weeks.

  I could have seized power then, probably, but I chose not to, because while technically I was a criminal, I wasn’t a crook. I was one of the good guys.

  So my reputation kept the small-fry clear of me, but it attracted the bruisers. You don’t want to be drunk when someone is charging at you with a shiv.

  And there was one bruiser in particular who’d been gunning for me. Southern Brennan. He’d come in on the last ship, and the first thing he did was put out the word that he wanted my head on a pike.

  Brennan was one of the biggest guys I’d ever seen that wasn’t a mutant. His fist was the size of my head. He hadn’t even made it all the way through the Academy of Law before he’d committed so many brutal crimes that he was shipped straight to Titan. I heard that he once threw a Lawmaster at another cadet. I dunno about that; a Lawmaster weighs the best part of a tonne.

  Someone screwed up in the cadet screening process, that was certain. Or maybe something happened to him along the way, something that changed him. I guess that’s more likely, because cadets go through stringent psych tests right from the start. Brennan’s aberrations would have been caught a lot sooner if they’d been there all along.

  Anyway. The reason I bring him up now is that as Wightman and I were walking, Brennan appeared at the far end of the corridor.

  Wightman muttered a few select swear words and there was a definite hesitation in his step, but I kept going. I knew what I was doing. Keep a steady pace. Don’t try to stare Brennan down, but don’t ignore him either.

  I’d done this before, a couple of years earlier, shortly after I became a mod. A similar situation: a guy who wanted my intestines between his teeth solely because everyone knew that mods were hard to kill. In that case, I was able to put him off for months by telling him, “Not now. This is not the time, and you know that.” Kept that up for ages, until one day he was expecting me to do the same as I passed him on the way down into one of the northern mineshafts. Idiot. You never tell a man you want to kill him and then let your guard down. They found his body after a brief search at the end of the shift. All the signs indicated that he’d snagged his environment suit on something and for unknown reasons he’d ignored the suit’s low-pressure warnings.

  Now Southern Brennan was striding towards me, and I could tell that Wightman was ready to turn and run. But he held his ground. I was proud of him for that.

  Brennan was flanked by Vivean Kassir and Lorne Sims, both former Mega-City One Judges. They’d adopted him into their little clique, nurtured his psychopathic tendencies to use him as a weapon. It hadn’t worked the way they’d planned: they’d made the mistake of assuming that Brennan’s size and strength were balanced by a lack of brains.

  Now Brennan stopped in front of me, and Sims and Kassir spread out a little, making it very clear that Wightman and I were not expected to simply step around them.

  We were about four metres away when Brennan called out, “You cosy in there, Rico Dredd?”

  I slowed to a stop, regarded him as casually as I would if anyone else had asked me the time. “Meaning?”

  “You keep to yourself, feeling all safe and snug and protected. Tucked away in the warden’s pocket. You
think we don’t know? Comes to a fight, Rico doesn’t take sides because he’s already on the side of the establishment.”

  I was watching Brennan as he spoke, and it was hard to focus on his words because the man was just so damn huge. He was a head taller than me, and I’m no shrimp. Zero body fat. He looked like he’d been sculpted by someone who’d accidentally bought enough muscle for four people and didn’t want to waste anything.

  “You’re wrong about that,” I said. “I do take a side. Mine.”

  “They say you went out into the Bronze with twenty-five others and you’re the only one who made it back.” He took a step closer, and peered down at me. “You kill them?”

  “What do you want, Brennan?”

  “Same thing every drokker in this place wants.”

  “Freedom.”

  He shook his head. “Freedom’s just a point of view. What we want is control over our own lives. I aim to regain mine. A lot of people are going to get in my way. I think you’re going to be one of them, so I’m putting you on notice right now.” He tilted his head closer to mine, and I could almost hear the muscles in his neck creaking against each other. “You’re either on my side or in my way. There’s no neutral ground. You make your choice, Dredd.” He stepped back and glanced around. “And make it fast. All of this will come crashing down.”

  On Brennan’s left, Lorne Sims said, “I wouldn’t trust this drokker if he told me stomm was sticky.”

  Brennan calmly looked at me for a few more seconds, then said, “You think you’re a tough guy, Rico. I can see that in you. You think you’re top dog here, that nothing can touch you, because you and Copus made some kind of deal after you got back from the Bronze. You’re going to tell me what that is.”

  A voice from the far end of the corridor yelled out, “The hell is this, blockin’ the corridors? Keep movin’, you drokkers!”

  Brennan quietly said, “De Luyando. He’ll be the first to go.”

  I tried not to sneer as I said, “Right. When you seize control of a prison mining colony that’ll fall apart without support from a homeworld a billion kilometres away.”

  De Luyando yelled, “I said move, you spugwits! You want me to come over there and make you move?”

  Brennan turned around, muttering, “Pick a side, Dredd. I won’t tell you again.” He strode away, Sims and Kassir almost running to keep up.

  Wightman—when he was sure that Brennan was out of earshot—asked me, “How the hell did that animal get so close to making Judge?”

  There was no answering that. The same question had been asked about me, and probably a good number of the other prisoners on Titan. How could an institution as strictly controlled and as heavily monitored as the Mega-City One Academy of Law produce Judges who are anything less than perfect? For fifteen years, every aspect of our lives is scheduled, studied and logged. There’s almost nothing a cadet can do that falls outside the attention of the system.

  When my class was seven years old—Joe and I were the equivalent of seven, roughly, but it’s hard to be accurate because of the accelerated ageing process—Cadet Sabrina Han quietly told me that she hated Judge-Tutor Rowley. There was no one else around, and I never mentioned it to anyone, but the next morning Rowley strode up to Han and told her, “We’re not here to be liked, Han. We’re here to teach you. You don’t like that, you can quit. Is that what you are, Han? A quitter?”

  I don’t know, maybe Han had told someone else, and they’d mentioned it to Rowley. Still, the incident stands out in my memory as the first time I realised that my life wasn’t my own. The Justice Department owned everything about me, even down to the thoughts in my head. For a long time I was afraid to even think of anything negative about the tutors or the training, just in case. And this was before I understood about psychics.

  Wightman kept his voice low as we passed the scowling De Luyando. “Rico, if you had to take down Brennan, how would you do it? I’m not saying it will come to that, but if it does.”

  “Balls, throat, and eyes, in that order,” I said. “Simplest, quickest way to take him off the board.”

  “Jovus, that’s cold. You go for a guy’s eyes and miss, he is not going to let that slide. There’s no going back from that.”

  “You think I’m the sort of person who’d beat someone into submission so that later we can be pals?”

  “No, but... I mean, you might need them later, right? Say you were going to try to take control of the prison. You can’t kill everyone who stood against you, because that’d be all the wardens and guards, and they’re the ones who know how to keep the lights on and the air working.”

  “Kellan, we’re not talking about this,” I told him. “Seriously. We are prisoners here for good reason. There’s not one of us who doesn’t deserve this.”

  He stopped walking and stared at me. I had to stop too: didn’t want anyone else listening in on whatever he was about to say next. I knew what it was going to be, though.

  “Even you?”

  “I broke the law.”

  “But you said that the laws you broke were unfair. The system is unfair.”

  “Come on...” I nodded in the direction we’d been walking, and Wightman fell into step beside me. “Look, I still broke the law. Doesn’t matter how wrong a law is. If you break it willingly, you have to be prepared to pay the price.” I could see that he still wasn’t getting it. “Wightman, from the minute I hit the streets I tried to subvert the Department of Justice’s training. I thought I knew better, that their way was too restrictive, too inhuman.”

  “And now you don’t? Three years here have changed your mind?”

  “No. I was right then, and I’m still right. But if you take an action—regardless of the nature of that action, or the reason you’ve chosen to take it—and you’re fully aware of its impact and possible consequences, then you can’t complain if you end up suffering those consequences.”

  The corridor opened onto the transparent plasteen tunnel linking the prison’s administrative quarters to the hydroponic domes. On a clear day you could see the sun sinking behind Saturn, its light rippling through the rings. A breathtaking sight. But this was not a clear day. Visibility was down to about five hundred metres, I guessed. Titan’s atmosphere was brown, cold, dark. It was hard to shake the impression that there was oil in the water and grit in the clouds.

  Wightman said, “I’m beginning to think maybe you like it here, Rico.”

  I snorted, as well as anyone with mechanical lungs can snort.

  “Seriously. You weren’t even on the streets for a year before they arrested you. I think that maybe you became institutionalised in the Academy of Law. There’s no way to return to that once you graduate, so you put yourself in a position to get arrested and imprisoned. There’s not much difference between the Academy and this place, if you look at it in a certain way.”

  I honestly hadn’t considered that before. He was wrong, I was sure, but only an idiot dismisses an idea just because it makes them uncomfortable.

  I told him, “If you look at any two things in the right light, you can find similarities. That’s cherry-picking, Kellan. Shouting excitedly about the few similarities while brushing the many differences under the carpet is like trying to convince a fish that it can live in gasoline. Gasoline and water are both liquids, both have hydrogen as a key element, you can store them both in buckets.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But I don’t like it here, any more than you do.” I held out my hands, palms-up. “Look what they’ve done to us.”

  Wightman glanced at his own hands, but didn’t say anything. He’d never spoken of the reason behind his own transformation, but others had told me.

  He’d been out on the surface, part of a chain gang slowly sweeping across what had once possibly been a lake-bed. A scan had detected iridium deposits on the surface and the initial on-the-ground survey had provided confirmation: at some point in the past thousand
years a very large iridium-heavy asteroid had skimmed the atmosphere; chunks of it had broken off and deposited an estimated nine billion credits’ worth of the precious metal across the surface. The easiest and cheapest way to find and retrieve the fragments was the chain gang: fifty prisoners chained together for four days, carefully sieving through the sand- and dust-covered lake-bed.

  On the third day, Wightman had noticed that his environment suit was telling him its urine pack was full. He signalled to the nearest guard and said, “Need to purge here, chief.”

  “Not now,” he was told. “Shift ends in four hours twenty. Hold it.”

  “I have been holding it, chief,” Wightman had replied. “All morning. It’ll auto-purge if I don’t—”

  “Just keep working, Wightman.”

  After another hour of ignoring his suit’s signals that the artificial bladder was dangerously full, Wightman again asked for permission, and was again denied.

  Ten minutes later, he decided drokk it, what were they going to do? Fire him? He turned around and released the bladder’s valve. The stream of urine had been under more pressure than he’d realised, and in Titan’s low gravity it arced out pretty far. The urine froze almost instantly, of course, but it still had momentum and mass.

  It hit another guard square in the back of his helmet. I haven’t read the report but it’s easy to guess that the guard thought he was under attack.

  He spun around and opened fire. His shot drilled a hole in Wightman’s chest and emerged between his shoulder blades, then passed straight through his oxygen tank.

  It was practically a miracle that Wightman didn’t die before they got him back to the prison. As it was, he suffered oxygen deprivation, hypothermia and severe blood loss. Turning him into a mod was the only way to save his life. No, let me be more accurate: it was the only way to save his life that would leave him still able to work.

  I knew he didn’t accept what they’d done to him, that the sense of betrayal and horror and loss had never left him.