Rico Dredd: The Titan Years Page 5

  But if I did, then what? I didn’t know who he’d told, or if another Judge had ordered him to watch me. If a Judge goes missing, the Department turns the city upside-down looking for him. Like they did with Kenner. They’d investigate me, if I wasn’t already on their watch-lists, and they’d find out everything. There was no way I could convince them that I was doing the right thing.

  Joe stepped closer, his hands empty. I still had time.

  And there was still a way out of this.

  I said to him, “I was wondering when you’d show up, Little Joe.”

  Livingstone muttered something under his breath about “two of them!” but although I was looking at him, my attention was on Joe.

  “You’re not going to let this rest, are you, little brother? Okay. Two ways it can go. Either we work together—or one of us doesn’t leave here alive.”

  He said nothing, as I’d expected.

  “Which is it to be, Joe? Stick with me, I’ll show you how to become a very rich man.”

  Joe said, “I’ve seen all I want to see, Rico.”

  He needs a demonstration, I remember thinking. Have to show him what this is really all about. Aloud, I said, “No, Joe. I don’t think you have. You haven’t seen what happens to scum who don’t do what I say!” I pointed my gun at Livingstone’s chest, aimed down at his sternum. I’m a good shot; I knew exactly what damage a Ricochet bullet would do at that range, at that angle. Crack the bone, lodge in the body. He’d be out of commission for a few days. A good demonstration to Livingstone and to Joe.

  Livingstone started to back away. “Please, Rico. I can’t pay you any more!”

  I smirked. “You’ll pay with your life, then!” I squeezed the trigger.

  I knew the instant that the gun fired that something was wrong. You develop an instinct for that in the Academy. Different rounds have different kickbacks. This one...

  This one was not a Ricochet bullet. It was Standard Execution.

  Joe’s fault, damn him. Totally his fault. He’d distracted me before I could reselect Ricochet.

  Livingstone collapsed face-down to the floor, a growing pool of blood spreading out from under him.

  Out of habit, I dropped down into a crouch next to him, checked his pulse, even though I knew there was no point: the exit wound in his back was large enough to put my fist in.

  I looked up at Joe. He was staring at me like he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.

  I could barely believe it myself. I’d killed before, plenty of times, but that was always intentional. It wasn’t like this. But there are no take-backs with a Lawgiver. There’s no “Undo” button on a gun.

  If I’d been anyone else, Joe would already have shot me. No, scratch that—he’d have shot me before I pulled the trigger on Livingstone.

  “This... this doesn’t have to be a problem, Joe!”

  He said nothing, just slowly crouched and pulled out his Lawgiver from his boot-holster.

  “We can make it look like an accident!”

  Joe straightened up, still staring at me. “No way, Rico. I’m taking you in.”

  I wanted to make him understand. Had to make him see that my way was right. Why couldn’t he see that? We were the same person!

  He swapped his gun to his left hand. He’s pretty much ambidextrous—as am I—but the left hand was important. He wasn’t quite ready to gun me down.

  Or maybe, I thought, he knows he can’t do it.

  “You take me?” I said. “Don’t make me laugh! I was always better!” I wanted Joe to see reason here. Livingstone was scum. He’d have died on the streets long ago if it hadn’t been for me. His death today was an accident. And it was more than he deserved.

  But my brother—that humourless, stick-in-the-mud, festering scab—just stared me down.

  All right, then, I thought. He’s not going to budge. He’s going to make me do it. He’s going to make me draw on him. If that’s what it takes to get out of this, then fine. I could kill him and then switch the scene around a little, make it look like it was me who’d stumbled across him attempting to extort money from Livingstone. But no, if I was already under investigation, they’d know not to trust me.

  But if they caught me... I knew what happened to corrupt Judges. Better to die here and now than to end up like that.

  And then a simpler thought occurred: I could just kill Joe and pretend that he’s me and I’m him. They’d never be able to tell. Physically we’re identical, right down to our DNA. I’d just have to get used to people calling me Joe instead of Rico. And if there were any discrepancies, like if I didn’t know something that Joe was expected to know, then I’d be able to cover that by pretending I was in shock at having had to kill my own brother.

  “Too bad, Little Joe,” I said to him. “But one of us has to go.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” he said.

  That’s where I made a mistake, and who can blame me? He was my brother. I thought he meant that I wasn’t willing to shoot him—which would have been dead wrong on his part—but he actually meant I wasn’t going to be able to shoot him. Turned out he was right about that.

  He stood staring at me, Lawgiver by his side, not moving.

  “Damn you, Joe, fire!”

  Nothing. Not even a flicker of a reaction.

  I raised my gun. “Why don’t you fire—?”

  He rushed at me, moving faster than I was expecting. I pulled the trigger three times before a blinding pain in my jaw sent me flying backwards.

  For a long time, I didn’t know how he did it. How could he have moved so fast? How could I have missed—I was always the better shot, always faster on the draw. In the Academy, he never once beat me.

  But he took me down without firing a shot, got barely a scratch in return.

  Eventually, I figured out how he managed it, but of course by then it was far too late. It wasn’t that Joe was better than me. I was always the best, and I still am. It was because I’m the best.

  It was subconscious. I let him do it because I couldn’t kill my own brother. He was part of me.

  That’s the only explanation that makes sense. See, Joe was well within the Law to kill me, but he didn’t. He used his fists instead of his trigger-finger, because it was the same for him. He couldn’t kill a part of himself.

  Six

  THERE WAS NO trial, of course, but there was an official investigation, and that was almost the same thing.

  They kept me cuffed, gagged and under mild sedation while witnesses were brought in, scanned, questioned, cross-questioned, and dismissed. Few of the witnesses would look me in the eye, or even glance in my direction.

  I’d tried to explain what I’d been doing. I showed them the dossier I’d compiled on Sparks Petrosky and the other mob leaders. I gave them the names of the losers, users and abusers I’d encountered. And I did a damn good job. Anywhere else, they’d have understood. They’d probably have pinned a Grud-damned medal on me.

  But none of it made any difference. I’m sure they went out and made all the appropriate arrests afterwards, but the investigation was really about one thing: punishing me because I’d tried to make a difference. Because I’d rocked the system. Because I’d shown them a better way, and made them look bad in the process.

  The Justice Department exists because they have the only voice in the city. They’re untouchable, unimpeachable. They wield absolute power over the citizens. And they hung me out to dry because I showed them how tenuous their position really is. I was an embarrassment to them because I was right.

  On the evening of the third day, at the hearing’s closing session, I said nothing; there was nothing left to say. I could have protested my innocence one more time, but that would have been pointless. They wanted me gone, and there was nothing I could do about that.

  And then I was instructed to stand.

  Chief Judge Clarence Goodman looked down at me and hesitated for a moment. “Rico Dredd, on the charge of the premeditated murder of cit
izen Virgil Alain Livingstone, this board has taken your testimony, witness statements and the physical evidence into consideration. We have concluded that citizen Livingstone’s death was unintentional, and on said charge this board finds you innocent.”

  A murmur broke out among the gathered Judges, and for a moment I almost believed that I’d be exonerated. But I knew better. I knew how the Justice Department worked.

  Goodman waited for the noise to subside. “But Livingstone’s death was not unavoidable. Rico Dredd, you abused your position as a Judge for personal gain, and in doing so you put the life of citizen Livingstone—and countless others—at risk. A Judge’s first duty is to serve the citizens, and in that duty you have failed.”

  I looked around. Joe was there, standing at the back with his arms folded, looking only at Goodman. Next to him was Gibson, but at least he’d had the decency to remove his helmet and appear concerned for his old friend.

  “Rico Dredd, this board finds you guilty of conduct unbecoming of a Mega-City One Judge. Specifically, multiple counts of extortion and theft, and deliberate actions that led to the manslaughter of citizen Virgil Livingstone.” Goodman looked around the room. “If any Judge present has anything to say before I pass sentence, speak now.”

  I glanced toward Gibson again, but he just looked away. Can’t blame him, I remember thinking. He’s not exactly squeaky-clean himself. But Joe... That hurt. Joe could have said something. Sure, it mightn’t have made the slightest difference, but he could have tried. He could have stood up for his brother. Even if he was never going to help me dispose of Livingstone’s body and let me go—and I’d been mistaken in thinking he might be flexible enough to see things my way—he could at least have appealed for leniency.

  Hell, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d actually done the opposite and told the Chief Judge to throw the book at me.

  With me out of the way, Joe was all set to become top dog in Mega-City One.

  And so there was only silence, and my last hope flickered out.

  Few of my tutors or mentors were present, and for that I was glad. Judge Morphy, who’d always had the air of a kindly old uncle when he spoke to me and Joe, would have given me that look, the look that said, “Rico, you let me down.” The same look I’d seen on Kenner’s face that time he confronted me about Stacie Quasarano.

  Goodman cleared his throat. “Very well. Rico Dredd, you are dishonourably discharged from the Justice Department, and sentenced to a period of no less than twenty years penal servitude.”

  And that was it. More than a decade as a cadet, a year on the streets, and it was over.

  Goodman left the podium and the public gallery was cleared, then six senior Judges marched me toward the side-entrance and into the long corridor that led to the Judge Cubes, where Goodman was already waiting.

  To the senior Judges, Goodman said, “Give me a minute with him. Alone.”

  The Judges hesitated for a moment, then moved away.

  Goodman glared at me. “What the hell is wrong with you, boy? Top of your class year after year in the academy. Even before you graduated, I had the heads of every department begging me to give you to them.” He thumped his fist against his ornate golden chestplate. “You could have been wearing this one day. You threw all that away, and for what? For a few handfuls of credits? Grud-damn it, Rico... You know the Law better than anyone!”

  For the first time since the investigation began, I spoke. “Almost anyone.”

  “What? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re talking about Joe? Don’t go thinking he gets off scot-free. If he’d turned you in earlier, Livingstone would still be alive.”

  “So now what?” I said. “I spend the next twenty breaking rocks in the Cursed Earth? I can take that. I’ll still be younger than you are now when I get out.”

  “Cursed Earth nothing,” Goodman snarled at me. “You’re going to Titan.”

  Titan

  2080 AD

  Seven

  WHEN YOU’VE LIVED all your life on Earth suddenly finding yourself on one of Saturn’s moons is unbelievably unsettling. The atmosphere on Titan is toxic to humans: mostly nitrogen, with a tiny percentage of methane and hydrogen. And the moon’s gravity is only about a seventh of that on Earth, which takes a lot of getting used to.

  Most of the time you can’t even make out the sun, the atmosphere is so hazy. On the rare occasions when the air is clear and the sky is cloudless, it’s just a weak dot in the sky, not much brighter than Venus appears from Earth. And it barely seems to move because—like Earth’s moon—Titan’s day is the same length as its orbit, which means that one side is always facing Saturn. That’s one sunset every sixteen Earth days, just about.

  But then there’s also a planet-set, when Saturn eclipses the sun. The first time you see that, it’s spectacular. It takes hours, of course, with the sunlight rippling through the rings. It’s honestly one of the most breathtaking things I have ever seen.

  The feeling doesn’t last, though. Not when you’re working back-breaking twelve-hour shifts out in the low gravity, chained to your fellow inmates, sweating inside your environment suit as you swing a pick-axe over and over at the unyielding ground. Knowing that in all likelihood you’re going to die in that Grud-forsaken place, and that meant some other poor drokker would have to spend a day digging your grave.

  On my second day on Titan, one of the inmates—a hulking ex-military guy called Cronyn—hit a particularly tough rock and the head came off his pick-axe. It bounced and struck another prisoner right in the environment suit’s visor, cracking it.

  He was dead in seconds.

  The guards’ only response was to order Cronyn to pick up the dead man’s pick-axe and keep digging.

  We worked alongside the corpse for another three hours, until shift’s end. Then we carried him between us—still chained—back to the prison.

  I WAS SENTENCED in the dying days of December 2080, when Saturn was on the opposite side of the sun to Earth, a distance of one-point-seven billion kilometres. So it wasn’t cost-effective to send me to Titan then. I was held in an iso-cube until the following July, when Earth’s orbit took it closer to Saturn, only one-point-two billion kilometres.

  Even so, the trip took almost two months. Eighty-four prisoners and eight warders trapped in a craft not much bigger than a standard passenger airliner.

  To avoid any trouble, we were kept under constant mild sedation. Aware of what was going on around us, and of time passing, but unable to muster the energy to even complain about it. We had been strapped into our seats and hooked up to intravenous lines to keep us alive.

  For the most part, the warders stayed in cryogenic suspension. They woke in shifts, two weeks on, three weeks asleep, but there wasn’t anything for them to do while they were awake except read or watch movies. That simple privilege was denied to the prisoners. The best we got was every two days being released from our seats—one at a time—and allowed to walk the length of the shuttle a couple of times.

  The shuttle touched down on Titan in the late summer of 2081, and the final three days before landing were excruciating. The shuttle had been under constant acceleration since leaving Earth’s orbit, and that acceleration provided gravity. But then it had to flip over and use its thrusters to decelerate in order to avoid overshooting its target. For those seventy-two hours, we were subject to five times normal gravity. We could do nothing but sit there and ride out the pain.

  One of the prisoners didn’t survive that part of the trip. When finally we touched down, the prison’s doctor examined him and declared that his heart had failed, probably within the first few minutes.

  The rest of us were fitted with electrocuffs, linked together with chains, and led shuffling from the shuttle through a succession of bare, damp, brightly-lit corridors and stairwells into a large glass-domed room, where ten heavily-armed guards were waiting.

  One of them stepped forward as we filed into the room, a big man, maybe forty years old. “I am sub-wa
rden Martin Copus. It’s my job to keep this operation running smoothly. I take that responsibility very seriously, so you do what you are told and there’s a chance that you’ll live long enough to see the end of your terms.” To the guards, he said, “Line them up. Strip them and scan them. Check their fingerprints, retinas, voice-patterns and DNA against the manifest.”

  This process took the best part of an hour, but we could deal with that. After the constant five-gees of deceleration, Titan’s low gravity was like a long, cool drink on a sweltering summer’s day.

  Eight of the new arrivals had been smuggling contraband: cash, drugs and electronics that they’d somehow managed to hide from the searches back on Earth. It was confiscated, but none of them were punished.

  And then came the needles.

  First, they took something away: a litre of blood from every prisoner. “Blood’s in short supply around here,” Copus told us. “Get into an accident, and you’ll be damn grateful we did this.” This was followed by a powerful, general-purpose antibiotic, and a number of vaccinations and deep-tissue injections that left us clutching sore, swollen arms and cursing the medics. The last injections before we were issued with the one-size-doesn’t-fit-all uniforms was the most painful; a GPS tracker implanted deep into the pelvic girdle. Some of the prisoners had to be held down for that one.

  It was only when it was all done that Copus informed us that one of the injections had been a contraceptive. “Lasts about eight months. We don’t have a childcare facility here, and we don’t intend to start one.”

  The prisoners’ names were read out in alphabetical order, so it wasn’t long before they reached me. “Rico Eustace Dredd, former Judge. Mega-City One. Twenty years.”

  “Take him to the side,” Copus said. Two guards grabbed hold of me and dragged me out of the line.

  When the roll-call was done, I was one of eleven prisoners who’d been singled out, all Judges.