Seven

 

 

I TOLD WIGHTMAN to go back to the bus. “Tell Copus to give me sixty minutes.”

“Then what?”

“That’s up to him. But I want sixty minutes to check it out for myself.”

I waited for Wightman to slither back down the other side of the hill, then moved forward.

The hill was steeper on this side, but craggier, which made climbing down a little easier. I was, of course, in full view, and for the first few metres I kept expecting a searchlight, or a shouted warning, or gunfire.

I half ran, half slid down the last few metres of loose scree, then took the time to dust myself off as well as possible: it seemed to me that if anyone was watching, then my casual, no-hurry, no-big-deal approach might be intriguing enough to keep their fingers off their triggers.

As I neared the hole in the wall, I was finally able to get an idea of the scale of the building: the hole was as tall as me, and had been blasted in a corridor wall. A few scraps of scorched metal were half-buried in the dust around me, but far less than I’d have expected from a hole that size: the explosion had pierced the wall but not shredded it.

I picked up a fist-sized chunk. It felt solid, but it was lighter than it looked, even taking Titan’s low gravity into account. A lot lighter.

That was when I realised something that should have been obvious from the start. In the holo message Wightman had recognised the wall panels as foamed steel, which suggested that Harrow was on a ship. But she contacted the prison through the physical comm-link: there was no way to do that without actually being inside Huygens Base.

See, you don’t fly a billion kilometres to Saturn’s largest moon and then spend months building a top-secret hidden base. That would be incredibly wasteful. What you do instead is fly to the moon, land your ship and then your ship becomes the base. It’s already airtight, it’s got power, it’s outfitted with crew quarters and everything else you need. Plus, in a real emergency, the whole damn thing can take off and go somewhere else.

I tossed the lump of foamed steel aside and kept walking towards the ragged opening. Now I could see the damage to the wall on the other side of the corridor, and to the floor and ceiling: the explosion had not been caused by a shaped charge.

I climbed the slight incline leading to the hole and this close it was even more obvious that this was no natural plateau. The exterior hull of the ship had been copiously but inexpertly sprayed with a plastic paint that was a reasonable match for the surrounding dirt, and many of the “plateau’s” larger boulders and outcrops were clearly fake. They were covered with seam-lines and fingerprints, and here and there the wire-mesh framework showed through.

Once, in Mega-City One, I investigated the death of an actor on a set modelled on twentieth-century Detroit, and that set was what the half-buried ship reminded me of. From a distance, it was the perfect illusion; but up close it was a mess.

As I stepped inside, normal gravity returned—or close to normal, anyway—and I sniffed the air. My cybernetic olfactory system wasn’t particularly well-calibrated, but I could still detect scorched metal and plastic.

Inside, the corridor seemed empty. To the right, it stretched on for about ten metres before curving away, and to the left, a few steps away, was a sealed interior door.

I walked up to the door and knocked on it.

My logic, which seemed sound at the time, was this: if someone hostile had taken control of the base, then they’d probably assume that a prisoner would be on their side. But if Captain Harrow or one of her people had regained control, then they were the ones who’d called for help. So either way, whoever was in charge would be pleased to see me.

Or, at least, not overtly hostile.

Wightman’s idea of finding a second way in, on the grounds that any internal doors close to the rupture would have been sealed, seemed less likely now that I knew that this was a starship. Every internal door on a ship—especially a military vessel—has to be completely airtight.

I knocked again, much harder, and shouted, “Open up!” in the best Judge voice I was still able to muster.

I mentally pictured a bunch of low-rank soldiers on the other side of the door wondering what to do next. If there was anyone there at all.

Could be they’re all dead, I said to myself.

I hadn’t really entertained that thought until now, and that bothered me. I had been on Titan three times as long as I’d been a Judge: maybe I was starting to lose my edge. Certainly, back in the Meg, this situation would never have lasted this long.

I was about to knock for the third time when a voice said, “Identify yourself!” It wasn’t Captain Harrow, but whoever she was, she was standing on the other side of the door.

I called back, “Rico Dredd. Prisoner in the Titan mining colony.”

There was an awkward silence, then the woman asked, “You armed?”

“No.”

“Alone?”

“Right now, yes. But there are others waiting.”

Another pause. “Former Judge?”

I nodded, then realised she couldn’t see me. “That’s right. From Mega-City One.”

“Wait there. I need to seal off this corridor before I can open the door. Two minutes.”

“Understood.”

As I waited, I thought about what she’d said: “I need to seal off this corridor.” A strong indicator that she was alone. Everyone else dead. Did that mean that she was the killer, or the survivor?

Some mechanism inside the walls clunked and rattled into life. I pictured gears grinding together and a vacuum pump drawing the air out of the corridor. After just about two minutes, as promised, the door in front of me split vertically down the centre and slid neatly and near-silently into the walls.

Inside, the short corridor seemed clean and safe. Another door at the far end, ten metres away, and two more set into the right wall, about four metres apart. No debris, bullet-holes, scorch marks or body parts. That was a good sign.

I stepped in, and the first door closed behind me.

There was more clunking and rattling as the air returned, then the woman’s voice said, “I’m coming out now. I’m armed. I want to see you standing with your forehead pressed against the door you entered through, hands visible at all times. Try anything else and you’re dead. Do you understand and acknowledge?”

“I do.”

I turned around, pressed my forehead against the cold metal of the door, and stretched out my arms, fingers splayed.

Another door opened behind me, and quiet footsteps approached.

“Don’t move. Don’t even twitch.”

Something warm and metallic was pressed into the small of my back, felt like the muzzle of a large-calibre rifle. A black-gloved hand quickly and expertly patted me down, then I heard her move away.

“All right. Turn around. Slowly.”

I turned. Looking back at me along the barrel of a rifle was a woman in her mid-twenties.

She was a redhead; I liked that. Rich brown skin, strong build, short—barely up to my shoulder—and she was looking me square in the eye without flinching. I liked that even more.

“First Lieutenant Salome Vine. You?”

“I told you already. Rico Dredd. Former Judge, currently a prisoner at the iridium mine.”

“The hell are you doing here, Dredd?”

“We got a call from Captain Harrow. There’s an emergency line between here and the mine.”

“And they sent you, an unarmed prisoner, into an unknown but certainly hostile situation?”

I shrugged. “I’m more expendable than a guard, and I can operate outside without an environment suit.”

Vine lowered her weapon, and I got my first clear look at her face.

I’d met my share of attractive women back in the Big Meg, as a cadet and then as a Judge. Particularly as a Judge: women just gravitated towards me. And it wasn’t just my looks; they weren’t that superficial. I was physically identical to my brother and women generally steered away from him. Well, there were a few exceptions, but then the human race is peppered with crazies.

Women liked confidence, that was what I learned pretty shortly after puberty. Not arrogance, that’s a different thing entirely. Confidence is when you know you’ll be able to take care of something. Arrogance is when you think you’re the only one who can take care of it.

I’d been the best Cadet in the Academy of Law and I knew it, but that wasn’t arrogance, because everyone else knew it too. And I didn’t dangle it over people’s heads. I’m not a jerk. You don’t point out your successes and tell others, “You’re never gonna get there.” What you do instead is tell them, “Yeah, this is me up here on top. This is your goal. I want you to get good enough to knock me off.” It’s a simple equation: the harder you try, the better you’ll get. Practice can only improve your game.

But you don’t get to stay at the top of the heap without putting in the work, and I guess that’s what brought me to Titan.

I had been the best Judge in Mega-City One, but Little Joe had been right behind me, and he’d never slacked off. Joe never took a day to just chill and watch the world go by. He devoted every spare moment to the Law. When he wasn’t hitting perps, he was hitting the books.

Have to say, a couple more years and maybe he’d have caught up with me. I’m not saying I got lazy, but my self-selected lifestyle meant that I had to take downtime. I worked hard to shake up the system, to make it fair for everyone, not just the Judges, and that included the unpleasant task of letting the perps see me as one of them. I let them think I was on the take, because a corrupt Judge can get a lot closer to a mob’s centre of power than a Judge like Joe, who was always as straight and to-the-point as an arrow.

So if First Lieutenant Salome Vine was masking revulsion at my appearance, then that was a little annoying. She was the first new woman I’d met since being turned into a mod. Not counting some prisoners who’d arrived since, but then none of them had been interesting enough to snag my attention.

Vine, though... she was stunning. One of those people you know you’re going to remember for the rest of your life. Maybe it was her aloofness that I found enticing. After all, the best way to get someone to want something is to tell them they can’t have it. That’s what her demeanour was telling me.

She stepped back towards the door from which she’d emerged. “How many others are with you?”

“Six. Four guards, two prisoners. One of the other prisoners is like me. Modified.”

She watched me for a second, and it was clear that she was weighing up her options. “Okay. To be frank, Dredd, I wasn’t expecting anything. The next supply ship is four months away, and it’s pretty clear that this station operates under the radar. We are off the books. Do you know what that means?”

“I do. You can’t call for backup through the normal channels.” I took a step closer. “So for now I’m your backup. What’s the situation?”

“One hostile, one survivor.”

I said, “Got it. I’m going to operate on the assumption that you’re the survivor.” That was meant to be a moment of levity, but Vine didn’t crack a smile. “So what happened?”

“Follow me.”

She lowered her gun completely, and as she led me through the ship she filled in some of the background about the operation. “The hostile is Corporal John Armando. Thirty years old. Exceptionally skilled at hand-to-hand combat, weapons, tactics, anything you can name. Right now, he’s sealed in the lower levels—but he’s smart. He’ll find a way through.”

“What’s he got down there?”

“Enough air, water and food to last five years, minimum. More ammunition than he’ll ever need. Armoury, machine room, electronics lab, hydroponics... And access to the reactor.”

“You’re saying that he could just destroy the base?”

“The reactor is powerful enough to knock the whole damn moon out of orbit. But that won’t happen. There’s a lot of fail-safes, and Armando doesn’t have the clearance to bypass them. Or the skills to hack the computers.”

“You can’t just seal him in and leave him there?”

She slowed to a stop, and turned to face me. This close, I could smell her skin even with my altered olfactory system.

She looked as though she was about to say something, but frowned instead as she peered at me. Then she said, “I know you. I mean, I’ve seen you before.”

“Maybe you’ve met my brother back in the Meg. Last I heard he’s still a Judge.”

“Unlikely. It’s been four years since I last set foot in Mega-City One. It’s your eyes. Something about them.”

I guessed where she recognised me from, of course, but I preferred people to work it out for themselves. Kept at least one part of their brain busy. It had come in useful a couple of times when I was a Judge.

See, everyone was used to seeing pics of Chief Judge Eustace Fargo as an older guy. They recognise something of him in me and Little Joe, but they’re not always able to place it.

But I was wrong about Vine. She leaned even closer—I swear to Grud, for a second I thought she was going to kiss me—and said, “It’s you. The dead man.”

“The what?”

“You’re the one who survived that storm a few years back. It was my team who found you out in the Bronze, on the edge of suffocation. You were so far gone we almost didn’t bother trying to resuscitate you.” She stepped back, slowly shaking her head. “After everything you went through out there... What the hell did you do to end up like this?”

“Long story.”

She nodded and resumed walking.

But before she turned away, I saw another look in her eyes. I’d seen it before, a couple of times, when I was on the streets of the Meg. Sometimes a Judge just knows everything has turned a corner and there’s no way back.

Vine had that look now.