Eclipse

by James Swallow

  Still, trust never came easy to Dredd and Kontarsky had a long way to go before she fully earned his. Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer, he remembered, watching her from the corner of his eye.

  "Now that we are outside the city walls, perhaps you would be kind enough to inform me as to where we are going?"

  "I found something at Kepler, in the oxy-station. Someone tampered with the airflow."

  "Tek-Division said the oxygen outage was an accident. That's what triggered the disturbance."

  Dredd shook his head. "I'm not convinced. Those Moon-U creeps were right there, stirring up trouble the moment the fans stopped spinning. They knew what was going to happen. They caused it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Moonie is to blame for this."

  "Moonie, Moonie, everything keeps coming back to him. I don't understand, Dredd, what kind of person is he? If what you say about him is true, how can a man nurture such a plan for two and a half decades without being discovered?"

  The railshuttle rattled through a set of points. "Money, Kontarsky. Cold, hard credits. Moonie was one of the richest humans alive when I busted him and back then Luna-1 was a boomtown, full of men who were more than willing to take his coin - Judges included. And those that didn't work for him were afraid of him."

  "But you put him away. You changed all that."

  "I thought I did. Now I'm not so sure. Power like that doesn't just dry up overnight. Moonie just made sure his assets went dark, so he could pick them back up when he needed them. If I hadn't arrested him then, he would have ended up owning the Moon, lock, stock and moonrocks. That's been his goal all along. What he's doing now, it's all steps along the same road."

  "He wants to become lord of the Moon, is that it? Like some deformed gnome king from a child's storybook?"

  Dredd shrugged. "That's a little more flowery than I'd put it, but yes, that's about the size of it. He poured his life into exploring the Moon and it bit him in the ass when that virus infected him. He's been looking for revenge ever since... He told me once that the Moon 'owes him' and to pay back that debt he's gonna try to take it all."

  "He's insane," Kontarsky pronounced.

  "That fact has never been in question," agreed Dredd.

  She responded with a slight, humourless smile. "I'm still waiting for an answer. Where is this train taking us?"

  Dredd pointed to the window. "Take a look."

  Kontarsky pressed her face to the glass, craning her neck to look along the direction the railshuttle was travelling. Rising up from the vast bowl of Catharina Crater was a gunmetal hemisphere. It sat like a vast silver-grey octopus, thick tubular tentacles extending out to the surrounding moonscape and vanishing into smaller caverns. In the surrounding acres, robotic ice harvesters combed the lunar mantle for ancient deposits of frozen gases, while vent tunnels big enough to drive a mo-pad through connected the facility with distribution plants in Luna-1. The Sov-Judge saw the glitter of a holo-sign floating above the dome: LunAir - Every Breath You Take!

  "The Oxy-Dome Complex," Dredd announced. "The central atmosphere recycling plant for most of the Moon, including Kepler."

  "You think we'll find Moonie there?"

  "No, but someone in that dome shut off the air to Kepler and they did it on Moonie's orders. We find them..."

  "We find him," Kontarsky finished.

  "Find him!" Moonie raged, his broad, leering face turning pinkish-red as the blood rushed through the nearly translucent skin over his skull. Spittle flew from his lips and as an afterthought, he struck his aide across the cheek. "You are worse than useless, you skinny wretch! You assure me that Dredd is behind bars, then you tell me that he isn't... What do I pay you for?"

  Sellers's throat went dry and his jaw worked as he tried to explain himself. Across the table in the Silent Room, he could see the other two members of the cabal watching his superior's tirade with utter calm, their faces neutral. In many ways, that was more insulting than if they had openly mocked him for his mistakes.

  "Answer me!" Moonie snapped, rocking forward on his hoverchair. "Where is Dredd?"

  "Our man in the Special Judicial Service is searching," the words came out in a rush, "and he informs me that Judge-Marshal Che is extremely distressed about the development."

  "He's not the only one!" bellowed Moonie. "We should have taken Dredd ourselves instead of letting those idiot Judges confine him! That indecisive dolt Che isn't fit to lead a Mariachi band, let alone a city!" The old man coughed harshly, his energy all but spent on the effort of losing his temper.

  "Better that Che is in charge than someone else," said the bald man. "He may have found the hypno-pulser we used to affect Tex but his ineffectual manner will serve our needs just as well." He paused and looked away. "As for Dredd, your obsession with this man is clouding your vision of the larger picture."

  Moonie's face reddened once again, but the tall man cut him off before he could launch into another furious rant. "But, as we all know, Dredd is an impediment that must be dealt with and while I had hoped we might be able to recover him intact, for examination purposes, I see now that his death is the only logical route to pursue."

  "Finally!" Sellers muttered. "You had him in your sights a half-dozen times and now at last you want to kill him."

  The tall man deflected the comment effortlessly. "Please do not try to shift blame to me for your failures, Sellers. Despite your rudeness, I will grant you this gift." He produced a rod-like device and placed it on the black stone table.

  Moonie's chair skated closer and he snatched up the object before his aide could touch it. "What is this?" he asked, even as he thumbed a switch on the tip.

  The holo-screen blipped and shifted to show a relief map of the lunar surface. A bright indicator flag shimmered into existence near the base of the Sea of Nectar.

  Moonie's age-yellowed teeth showed in a feral smile. "A tracer?"

  The tall man nodded. "Dredd is not alone. I took the liberty of placing a tracking device on the person of his travelling companion."

  "Kontarsky..." said Sellers. "The iso-cube guard told the SJS that she was Dredd's hostage."

  "A simple fiction," said the tall man. "But one that will soon come to an unhappy ending."

  Sellers studied the map. "The air plant. He's heading toward the air plant."

  Moonie sneered. "It doesn't matter. He'll never get the chance to act on anything he finds there." The aged crime lord stabbed at a communicator control on his chair. "Get a hit team out to the Oxy-Dome complex. Dredd is there. Tell them to bring me back his head."

  The two Judges kept to the shadows, avoiding the footprints of heat sensors and the scanning heads of static security cameras. The railshuttle was already gone, having paused for only a few moments on a siding inside the Oxy-Dome before rumbling onward with one less container of mechanical spares on its flatbed. It was time enough for Dredd and Kontarsky to alight, slipping between loader-meks that carried huge chunks of gas ice from automated cars that went to and from the mineshafts.

  There was air inside the Oxy-Dome, warm and humid, a spill-off from the electro-chemical cracking processes that constantly thundered through the fractionation towers around them. The atmosphere smelled dull and stale here, thick with the recovered exhalations of millions of Luna-1 citizens.

  Kontarsky nodded at a complex knot of pipes and conduits that emerged from the dome's lower levels. "Those are the recycler channels. There's carbon dioxide coming in through them and filtered oxygen going back."

  Dredd gave an absent nod, watching a large crane grab pass over their heads carrying a pallet piled high with chips of dirty ice. Most of the frozen gases used by LunAir came from numerous deposits inside the lunar rock face, but some had a more distant origin, carved off the sides of comets in slow solar orbits and sent hurtling moonward to soft-land in the Sea of Nectar. Harvester robots scooped up the fragments and ferried them back to the Oxy-Dome in a constant circuit.

  The Mega-City Judge pau
sed and watched the vast machines working around them in a hissing, clanking ballet of metal and plastic. "No humans here," he noted, "not even an observer pod or an overseer."

  "We should locate the command centre," said the Sov-Judge. "Any organic personnel would there-"

  She fell silent as a spotlight stabbed out of nowhere and flooded their concealment with hard, white light. A synthetic voice screeched from above them. "Intruder alert! Industrial spies detected! Confine and terminate!"

  "That's not good," Dredd said and snatched at Kontarsky's arm, pulling her out of the spotlight. Ozone crackled through the air behind them as an electro-blaster shot thousands of volts into the space where they had just been crouching. The harsh sodium glare swivelled to follow them and Dredd caught a glimpse of its source: an insectile security drone suspended on a quad of vector-jets. Amid the constant noise of the oxygen works, neither of the Judges had heard the robot approaching them.

  Kontarsky understood what needed to be done before Dredd said it to her and she broke away from him, sprinting in the opposite direction. The drone saw the movement and hesitated for a fraction of a second, unsure if she or Dredd were the target of primary importance. In that moment, Dredd set his STUP-gun to level four tight-beam and shot at it.

  The pulse-blast sheared one of the thruster pods off the drone and sent it listing to starboard like a sailboat caught in a sudden gale. The spotlight ran wildly over the walls as it struggled to regain control of its flight. Another pulse of hot light from the direction that Kontarsky had run flickered into the drone's casing and buffeted it, but the machine recovered and aimed back at the Sov-Judge, fixing her in the middle of its sights. Without the anti-dazzle visor in her helmet, Kontarsky was blinded by the drone's beam and she fired wildly at it, her shots missing by several metres. Trapped between two slow-moving tankers, she braced herself for the inevitable shock of voltage from the e-blaster, but it never came.

  Without warning, there was an ear-splitting gush of sparks and something heavy flattened the drone into the sub-levels below them, knocking it out of the air like a fly swatted by a sledgehammer. Blinking away purple after-images on her retinas, Kontarsky looked up to see Dredd beckoning to her. Above the Mega-City Judge, a crane frame buzzed and spat where he had blown off the retaining bolts that held an ice pallet. "Spaciba..." she managed.

  Dredd pointed with the STUP-gun. "This way."

  Kontarsky shook off the sick feeling in her stomach that the fear of imminent death had created and followed him. She listened for the sound of drone motors and heard them - lots of them. Next time there would be more and Dredd would not be able to drop an ice load on all of them.

  "Neutralise the intruders!" screamed the electronic voice. "Productivity has been threatened! Intercept and destroy!"

  Klaxons were sounding now and flashing red strobes pulsed into life across the inside of the Oxy-Dome. Robots that had the right kind of sensors or that weren't engaged in some kind of critical work stopped what they were doing and looked for the two human shapes; the data from them went straight to the security drones, vectoring them toward the Judges like a flock of airborne predators.

  "We must get off the factory floor!" Kontarsky cried. "We are too exposed here!"

  Dredd ducked into an alcove where a heavy hatch was half-concealed in shadow. "Here!" he snapped. "Help me with the wheel!"

  The door had not been used in a long time and rust caked the lip and the circular handle in the centre. Clearly, no human had been into this part of the oxygen works in years. With a final grunt of effort, Dredd and Kontarsky forced the hatch open and almost fell through it, desperately pushing it shut again as the drones closed in. The man-sized entryway was too small for the larger security flyers, but both Judges knew that it wouldn't be long before a humanoid robot was sent after them.

  "This..." Kontarsky said, catching her breath. "This has not gone as well as I would have hoped."

  Dredd spared her a look. "We go up," he said. The hatch opened on to a ladder that extended away to the myriad sub-levels below and the multiple floors above. "This must be some sort of maintenance duct, for human use."

  Kontarsky considered this as they climbed. "You said yourself, they're aren't any people down on the lower levels."

  "No," he agreed, "and I'm starting to suspect that the only living things in this place are us."

  They proceeded almost without incident, except for a moment fifteen levels high, when something fast had come clanking up from below them. In the faint light of the shaft, all either of the Judges had been able to see were the sparks flicking off the walls as steel claws scraped their way up after them. Dredd ordered Kontarsky to look away and he fired his pulse gun past her, a full power charge ripping through the confined tube of air and striking the robot dead centre. It clattered and scraped all the way back down again, making fresh blooms of sparks as it fell.

  They continued upward. It was the longest climb of Nikita Kontarsky's life, or so it seemed. In the moments when she wasn't struggling with arms and legs that felt like lead, she marvelled at the constant pace that Dredd maintained, steadily advancing up the shaft toward the upper levels. Had she not known better, she might have suspected that the Judge was a machine himself, maybe one of those near-human life model decoy replicants that she had heard rumours about. What if he does have oil pumping through those veins, her fatigued mind wondered, what if Joseph Dredd has been dead for decades and Mega-City One has just kept on turning out robot duplicates? It was a mad idea, but one that many other kadets had declared as certain truth during her training. She shook the thought away as a strong hand curled around her wrist and guided her off the ladder.

  "We're here. Ready?"

  With effort, she raised her pistol. "I am."

  Dredd forcefully kicked open the hatch on the top level and strode out. Kontarsky followed him, watching. If Dredd wasn't a machine, then he was as near to one as a man would ever get.

  The room they had emerged in was a large gallery set into the roof of the oxygen works. From here, anyone operating the command consoles that ringed the walls could look out across the full spread of the dome's systems. This high up, the Oxy-Dome's interior looked like some vast set of interlocking clockwork toys, each working in perfect precision.

  The synthetic voice that had called the Judges out screamed through the air again, louder and more strident this time. "Alert! Alert! Intruders in central processing unit! Productivity is in jeopardy! Alert! Alert!"

  Slats in the ceiling retreated to allow arms on gimbals to extend downward, uncoiling like inverted scorpion tails; each one ended in the barbed sting of an active electro-blaster and they tracked as one toward Dredd and Kontarsky. The two law enforcers took cover and snapped out shot after shot from their pulse pistols, burning smoky soot-black sears across the roof of the chamber. The blasters fired back, but they were slow and had been poorly maintained, just like the rusted hatch. In a matter of a few moments, all the remote weapons had been destroyed.

  Dredd kept his gun handy and approached a central dais where a raised console sat. A crude approximation of a face - indicator light eyes and an oscillating sine wave mouth - was displayed there. "Identify yourself!" Dredd barked at the screen.

  "LunAir Oxy-Dome Control Computer XF6," replied the voice. "You are an intruder. The authorities have been notified. You will be captured and-"

  Dredd picked another console at random and fired a shot into it. The panel spat out a puff of desultory smoke and far below in the oxygen works, a whole sector of the plant went dark. "I want answers, chip-head, not a conversation. Where's your human overseer?"

  "System XF6 operates flawlessly without human intervention," the computer said snidely. "Orders come direct via data link."

  "You cut off the air to Kepler Dome. How?"

  "This unit cannot answer questions of-"

  Dredd blew a trio of fist-sized holes in a panel to his left and faint sirens screamed, as if the Oxy-Dome was a wounded animal cry
ing out in pain. "How?" Dredd repeated.

  It suddenly dawned on Kontarsky what Dredd was doing. Like many centralised industrial computers, the XF6 was programmed to prioritise factory productivity over everything else, even its own survival. By damaging its sub-consoles and wrecking the plant, Dredd was effectively interrogating the machine in the same way that someone might break a human subject's finger or strike them to elicit a response.

  "Productivity is in jeopardy!" the computer whined. "Please desist!"

  Kontarsky approached a large processor module and rested her STUP-gun's barrel on it. Dredd gave her a cool nod.

  "Wait! XF6 will respond!"

  "Better," said Dredd. "There are multiple redundant systems in the Luna-1 life-support hardware. How did you circumvent them all?"

  "All Luna-1 systems are built on an existing framework. Embedded commands in base software allow subversion of all subsequent additions and upgrades."

  "A back door program?" Kontarsky wondered. "When was it put in place?"

  "At the point of initial construction, circa 2058."

  "That's when Luna-1 was first built..." Dredd noted, "Drokk! That means there's been a kill switch wired into the whole city since day one!"

  "But who could have done this?"