Eight

 

 

“INSIDE,” SIEBERT SAID, gesturing to what was to be my home for the next two decades. It was barred on three sides—there were occupied cells on either side of mine—with a solid stone wall at the back.

I was last in our group to be assigned a cell, so I knew what to expect: “Walk to the wall. Stand facing it with your feet apart. Rest your forehead on the wall.”

I did as instructed, and Siebert unlocked my cuffs. “Next meal’s in two hours, inmate. Twenty minutes allocated. Then you’ll be fitted for your environment suit.” He’d said the same thing to every prisoner, in the same bored tone.

Siebert was tall and wiry, a mean-looking drokker who was smart enough to never find himself alone with a prisoner. This wasn’t like a prison movie, where there’s always one guard who’s unbelievably sadistic, who punishes the inmates to the point where they snap. Siebert was tough, unpleasant, but he had a full understanding of who he was dealing with.

The meal was simple; a scratched plastic bowl containing some kind of bland oatmeal-like paste, a cup of warm water that had a mild metallic tang, and a handful of raw carrots that were so pale they could have been parsnips.

Some of the other new prisoners weren’t able to keep it down, they had been so long without solid food. Me, I got cramps and a bad case of the sweats after only a few mouthfuls. Another prisoner, a lank-haired, hawk-faced man in his thirties, was hovering around our table, constantly asking, “You gonna finish that, fish? You eatin’ that? Lemme lick the bowl, huh?”

He tried it on me. “Hey, fishy-fish. You gimme the rest of your dinner an’ I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Take a hike, creep,” I told him.

“Not a creep,” he said. “Not a creep, new fish.” He stared at me with wide, twitching eyes that didn’t seem to be able to blink in unison. “You’re goin’ out today, first time steppin’ out into the Bronze, right?” Then he paused. “Damn, I probably sound like a crazy person. The Bronze is what we call the outside, because it’s all brown and stuff. Guy who came here from Enceladus fancied himself as a poet, he called it that. My name’s Pea. Yours?”

“Rico.” I decided to give the scuzzball a break. I’d learned on the streets of Mega-City One that crazy people could be very useful. Everyone underestimates them, and their behaviour can cover up a lot of actions that might otherwise draw suspicion. In a place like this, it might help to know someone who could get around without being noticed.

“You here for the twenty, Rico-fish, or did you earn more than that?” Pea asked.

“Twenty,” I told him. I figured that was his way of judging how dangerous someone was. “What about you?”

“Thirty-five. I’ll be seventy when my time is up, if I make it.” He grinned, showing off his meagre collection of brown teeth. “You were a Judge, weren’t you? Word gets around. Me, I got rail-roaded. I’m innocent.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, seriously. Totally innocent. I was a quality controller at Resyk in Meg Two. There was an accident, people died, I got the blame.”

“I remember that,” I said. “It made the news in Mega-City One. You were supposed to be monitoring the fluid filters but instead you were pilfering the corpses for gold fillings and pace-makers to sell on the black market. A valve failed and thousands of litres of body fluids bypassed the filters and ended up in your sector’s drinking water. Seventy thousand citizens poisoned by the faecal matter of four hundred corpses. Twelve deaths.”

Pea nodded. “That’s the story they reported. The truth is, I was off-shift when it happened but the Resyk controller had been angling to replace me with a droid, and this was the perfect chance to get rid of me.” He reached out his hand. “Elemeno Jameson Pea.”

I shook his hand, but I still didn’t believe his declaration of innocence. “Elemeno Pea. Parents had a sense of humour?”

“Yeah. Still, coulda been worse. My old man wanted to call me Asparagus.” He shrugged. “You want my advice, Rico? You hafta be like a raft on the ocean, got that? Don’t make waves….” Pea put out his hand, palm-down, then slowly and smoothly moved it away. “Just go with the flow. You might make it. You might. You don’t wanna end up a mod, like this poor drokker.” He pointed toward the door, where a figure was entering.

The man was tall, with a strong build. He was shirtless, and it looked like his skin was covered in grey dust. Later, I found out that was his skin.

Outside, in Titan’s dense atmosphere, a human cannot survive without an environment suit. It’s cold—eighty below, on a good day—and the air is toxic. But there were certain parts of the mines where an environment suit isn’t practical. Many of the tunnels have narrow passages where a suit will snag, and on the open plains during a dust-storm a suit’ll be shredded to rags in minutes.

So some prisoners are modified. Their skin is injected with an almost indestructible polymer. Their eyes are coated with a thinner, transparent layer of the same thing. Their lungs are replaced with a biomechanical breathing apparatus that converts the methane to oxygen. Their noses are removed, replaced with dust-filters, and their mouths sealed. For as long as the prisoner is on Titan, he or she won’t be able eat or drink or even breathe normally.

This is “the treatment.” Those who’ve been subject to it are called “mods” by the other prisoners.

My new friend Elemeno Pea said, “They say it hurts like Hades on a hotplate getting it done, hurts ten times more getting it reversed. But it allows you to work in the Bronze without a suit, and Copus likes that. Makes him less inclined to add days. Plus these mods don’t do twelve hours on and eight hours off like us. They do ten-on and ten-off. Has to be that way, because they hafta purge their nose-filters every ten hours. That’s something you don’t wanna see if you’ve just eaten.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “What do you say, Rico-fish? Sound tempting?”

“Not especially.”

“Doesn’t matter none if it is tempting, anyway, because it’s not up to us to decide if we want it done. That’s up to the sub-warden. You get on his wrong side, an’ he will literally tear your lungs out. And I literally do mean literally.”

 

 

THE REASON THE prison existed really was simple economics: the surface of Titan was rich in iridium deposits. Donny Guildford, a prisoner from Brit-Cit in the cell to the left of mine, told me about it.

“Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant element known. Very useful stuff, when alloyed with platinum or osmium or titanium. It’s really hard to find on Earth, but it’s common in meteorites and here in the outer system.”

Donny Guildford had been a civilian, a research scientist who’d taken to settling inter-departmental disputes with tiny amounts of thallium. He was quite an expert with poisons and, according to his prosecutors, had more than ten kills under his belt.

Guildford was also a mod. He’d been caught attempting to strangle another inmate to death—self-defence, he claimed—and sub-warden Copus had ordered that he be given the treatment.

“The operation takes five days, Rico,” Guildford told me late one night. “Heard they’ve got new drugs now that can make you forget the pain, but not when they did it to me. Five days of the purest hell you can imagine.”

Guildford was sitting on the floor, resting against the bars that separated his cell from mine.

“They strap you down first. Arms, legs, head. Make sure you can’t move. The eyes are the worst. Some guys say that the lungs hurt more, but not me. They hit you with a paralysing agent so you can’t squirm away, then they use a suction device to pop out your eyes. Spray them with the polymer. And even if they do now have something to make you forget the operation, it still hurts like drokk for months afterwards. Every breath, every blink… You won’t believe the pain, man. Just pray that they don’t do it to you.”

He twisted around and looked at me. It was hard to look back, but I wasn’t going to let myself flinch. He tapped the voicebox fitted to his throat. “Wasn’t for this, I wouldn’t even be able to speak.”

“Your mouth’s been sealed—how do you eat?” I asked.

Guildford took hold of the voicebox and pulled. It came away from his neck with a wet sound. He handed it to me, but I didn’t want to touch it. It was covered in saliva and mucus. Guildford reconnected the voicebox and said, “They give us a paste, like baby-food. Have to push it in with my fingers. It’s drokkin’ disgusting, man.” He shrugged. “But I suppose it does have its advantages. Out in the Bronze, before they did this to me, I was constantly watching the oxygen pressure on my suit. Don’t need to worry about that now.”

 

 

EVERY PRISON HAS its own hierarchy among the inmates. It didn’t matter how tough you’d been on the outside, when you arrived in the prison you were a new fish, on the bottom rung of the ladder, and the older fish did anything and everything to make sure you stayed there.

I quickly learned that many of the established prisoners particularly despised former Judges. Donny Guildford had warned me to watch my back, but I hadn’t paid him any attention. I was a Judge. I’d excelled in the toughest environment on Earth. I could take anything they decided to throw at me.

My first encounter with Register Forbes came a week after I arrived. Forbes was fifty years old, slightly balding, a once-solid build now heavy with age and lethargy. He had a lot of connections and he knew how to acquire things for other inmates. That made him powerful, and powerful men get to thinking they’re untouchable and immortal.

I didn’t know who Forbes was when he shoulder-bumped me as I passed him in the corridor, but I knew enough to tell that it was a test.

I called him on it. “Watch where you’re going, stomm-sucker.”

And instantly I was surrounded by five very large, dangerous-looking inmates, all scars, tattoos and knuckles.

One of them pushed his head so close to mine that when he spoke, tiny specks of spittle landed on my face. “You watch who you’re talking to, fish! Mister Forbes doesn’t get out of your way. You get out of his.”

I said, “If Mister Forbes has a problem with me, Mister Forbes can grow a pair and tell me himself.”

The bruiser telegraphed the punch. I dodged it easily, but didn’t strike back: I was testing them, too. I’d figured it wouldn’t be long before something like this happened.

The bruiser took another swing—I swear his fist was almost as big as my head—and again I dodged it. And then two of his friends grabbed hold of my arms.

They knew I was a Judge. How could they have not known? Sub-warden Copus had effectively tagged all the Judges the day we arrived by separating us from the other prisoners. So if Forbes knew I was a Judge, he must have known what was coming next.

It was over in seconds. I kicked the bruiser in the groin, he doubled over and—using his friends’ grips on my arms as leverage—I jerked both my feet up and slammed them hard into his head. Hard enough to send him sprawling and force the others to loosen their hold. I fell back between them, rolled onto my feet and crouched.

The two who’d grabbed me started to move toward me again, but Forbes called them off. “Let him be.”

He came closer, looked down at me. “You’re fast. I’ve heard about you, Rico Dredd. They say you were one of the best, until you turned bad.”

“They’re wrong on both counts,” I said. “I never turned bad. I just had my own way of doing things that didn’t sit well with the rest of the Justice Department. And I was not one of the best.” I straightened up. “I was the best.”

“They caught you. Can’t have been that good.”

“There were extenuating circumstances. What do you want, Forbes?”

For a moment he peered at me as though he was asking himself that same question, then he said, “I’m always on the lookout for people who might be useful to me, and I’ve a feeling you could be very useful indeed.” He extended his hand. “I think you and I will be strong allies.”

I ignored the hand. “That’s not your decision. What are you in for?”

“Murder. Multiple counts.”

I didn’t ask him if he was guilty. I could see it in his face. “I don’t ally myself with scum.”

Still with the same calm, detached manner, Forbes said, “Then you’re going to be lonely in this place. Listen to me, Rico. I can smooth the path for you. Make things easier.”

“Things are not supposed to be easy, creep,” I said. “This is a prison, not a day-centre. The Law put us here to punish us. We do our time, and we do not coast on the backs of others.”

Again, he regarded me silently for a few seconds. “You’re not a Judge any more. You’re one of us. Here, you play by our rules. Or you don’t get to play at all. See, there are degrees of punishment. Some prisoners—the weak—have no choice but to lie down and let the strong walk all over them. But some of us, by our very nature, will always rise to the top of any given situation. You strike me as a survivor, Rico. You should—”

By then, I had turned around and was walking away.

Forbes called after me. “You’re making a mistake. This offer only comes once. If you’re not with me, then you don’t get my protection. You know what that means in this place? It means you’re a dead man walking unless you get back here and pay attention when I’m talking to you!” He had to shout that last part.

In the cells that night, Guildford told me that I had written my own obituary. “He’s gonna come for you. Well, not him, but one of his guys.”

“Let them come,” I said. “I can take them.”

“No, Rico, you don’t get it. Forbes knows this place inside-out and upside-down. He knows all the guards, and he’s friends with most of them. That’s how he gets stuff in. It’s why he’s protected. He used to be a guard, back in the old prison on Enceladus. That’s where he got his nickname; he pretty much ran the prison, got all the day-to-day stuff done. The warden would say, ‘I need ten prisoners to swamp out the lower cells’ and Register would schedule it and pick the prisoners and the guards. He gave all the easy duties to his friends, dumped the crap on anyone who complained or criticised him.”

“He was the power behind the throne?”

“And then some. When they were preparing to evacuate Enceladus he was in charge of the flight manifests and the supplies and everything. A couple of the other guards caught him short-loading the iridium shipments back to Earth, and they threatened to squeal on him if he didn’t cut them in. He made like he was going to do it, but on the next shift he sent them out into the Bronze with sabotaged oxygen tanks. They were rigged to read like they were full, but they only had a couple of minutes of air.”

I nodded slowly. “He was caught, arrested, and ended up back here.”

“No. They didn’t even send him home first. The warden’s a Judge; he sentenced Register on the spot. One day Register’s got a cushy room in the guards’ quarters, next day he’s in a cell. But the thing is, he didn’t rat out anyone else he was working with. So the next day after that, Register is moved to a better cell, and his pals let the other prisoners know that he’s protected. Anything happens to him, they’ll get the treatment.”

I said, “I thought that Copus was the one who decided who got the treatment?”

“Officially Copus and the warden both have to agree to it, but the warden doesn’t care and Copus listens to Siebert. And Siebert is one of Register’s friends.”

With this new knowledge, the next day I made peace, of a sort, with Register Forbes. I found one of his thugs—the bruiser, now sporting an ancient, grubby neck-brace—and told him I wanted to meet.

I was brought to Register’s cell. Compared with the rest of us, he lived in a palace. It was twice the size of the other cells, and featured four stone walls—not a bar in sight. There was a toilet with an actual seat, and more than one blanket on the bed. Not that he’d need them; his stone-walled cell was considerably less draughty than any other place I’d seen in the prison.

Register was lying on the bed, and when he saw me enter he tossed his book aside and stood up. “So you changed your mind, Rico? Someone’s been talking to you, is my guess. Someone who knows the score.”

“You have friends back on Earth,” I said.

“This much is true.”

“So do I. And my friends are Judges. You think you can make things tough for me here? That’s a hangnail compared to what my friends can do to yours. To your family.”

“Huh,” he said. “That a threat?”

“Yes. And if you want clarification, try this: you hurt me, and every one of your friends back home will lose their eyes.”

I stepped closer to him, and his bodyguards rushed at me from the doorway. I elbowed one in the face, hard. I grabbed the wrist of another with both hands, then jerked him toward me and kicked him deep in the armpit. I let his dislocated arm drop as he screamed, then rounded on the third guard—a woman I hadn’t seen before. She was a lot shorter than me, but that didn’t stop me launching a right jab at her throat.

She expertly blocked it, then swung at me. I dropped into a crouch and kicked out at her knees. She side-stepped the kick, but her movement took her away from me long enough for me to get back on my feet.

There was a flurry of vicious punches, jabs and kicks on both sides, all of which were dodged or blocked.

It only came to an end when two of Register’s other guards jumped me from behind. They dragged me away from the woman and held me tight while Register checked her over.

“You’re not hurt?” he asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.

She shook her head as she continued to glare at me. “Nothing that won’t heal. Drokker’s stronger than me. Faster too. He’s a keeper.”

Register glanced at me. “I don’t know... He’s dangerous. And he can’t be trusted.”

“We’ll need him.” She pulled herself away from Register, and approached me. “Where’d you serve?”

“Mega-City One. You?”

“Same. Four years in Meg-South.” The woman was in her mid-twenties, and very definitely had the look of a former Judge; determined, confident, capable. She wasn’t what you’d call attractive—certainly not my type—but there was something about her that piqued my interest.

“What did they get you on?” I asked.

“Riot control. I opened fire on the crowd. Turned out there was a couple of undercover Judges among them. One of them survived, testified against me.” Without blinking or looking away, she continued, “Seems the Department has a problem with Judges walking up to fourteen wounded, unconscious rioters and putting bullets in their brains. What about you?”

“Corruption, they called it. And there was a death. Accidental, but... a fellow Judge didn’t see it that way.”

She tilted her head a little to the side as she gazed at me. “Has to be more to it than that.”

“There is.” I offered her my hand. “Rico Dredd.”

She shook it. “Adelaide Montenegro.” Her hand was warm, and she held onto mine for a second longer than necessary.

To the side, Register Forbes said, “If you two are done sizing each other up? Rico, we were in the middle of threatening each other. Where do we stand on that?”

I said to him, “Forbes, I don’t want to be part of your crew. You stay the drokk away from me, I leave you and your friends with all limbs and digits intact. How does that sound?” I turned and walked toward the door.

“You’ll be back, Rico!” he called after me. “Sooner or later, you’ll need me for something. You’ll come back. And when you do, if you don’t want to end up like your friend Donny Guildford, you’ll come back on your knees!”