“No,” Dredd said. “Weather-control.”
O’Donnell shifted the craft out of hover-mode and resumed the approach toward the town. “Exactly. All the mega-cities have their satellites working overtime to keep the elements out, makes sure it’s not too hot or too cold. In the Meg you let the people vote on whether they want sunshine or rainbows or a gentle fall of pretty snowflakes. They think that’s what the weather-control is for, don’t they? They’ve no idea that it’s about the only thing that’s saving them from being sand-blasted, scorched, frozen or irradiated out of existence.” He pointed toward the wide, slow-moving stream of detritus floating overhead. “Y’know, I heard that the weather-control satellites use the same gravity-distorting tech that created the death-belts in the first place.”
Ahead, the small town was laid out in a simple pattern: three long north-to-south streets split by five shorter cross-streets. Though some of the buildings were old-fashioned wooden-framed structures, anything that had been constructed since the war was squat, not more than two storeys high, with small windows and tapered walls: “Best way to ride out the storms without too much damage,” O’Donnell had told the Judges.
The shuttle touched down on a plaza in the centre of the town, where a small group of people was waiting in the shadow of a steel-framed watchtower. As O’Donnell was shutting down the controls, he said to Dredd, “Woman with the tricorn hat and the long coat? That’s Alfonsa Hanenberger. She’s the sheriff—self-appointed, of course—and she’s pissed as hell that your Sector Chief has only sent you three, so best not to get on her bad side, yeah? Make a good impression.”
“The others?” Dredd asked.
“The two women with the blasters on their hips are her bodyguards. Mercenaries. There’s eleven of them in total. Most of them guard the mine. The three older guys are Hanenberger’s advisors. Far as I can tell, their main job is to find evidence that proves anything she does is right.”
Dredd, Ramini and Montag followed O’Donnell out of the shuttle and toward the waiting group.
Alfonsa Hanenberger was thirty-four years old, but had the mottled, wrinkled skin and stooped posture of a woman twice that age: her Justice Department files mentioned a rare hereditary skin-condition. Given that she was worth several billion credits, it struck Dredd as odd that she hadn’t had rejuvenation treatments.
Hanenberger walked up to the Judges and looked them up and down, then stepped back and addressed Dredd. “Grud... you’re a child! What the hell is Benzon thinking? How long have you been a Judge?”
“Seventeen months since I graduated from the Academy.”
“Seventeen months? I got food in my fridge that’s older than that! What am I supposed to do with a rookie Judge who still has diaper-rash? I’ve got bands of Earthers swarming down on my town and shooting the place up, and the city sends me two women and a Judge who’s so wet behind the ears it’s a wonder his helmet hasn’t gone rusty.”
Hanenberger’s advisors chuckled at that, but it was obvious to Dredd that their amusement was forced. When the boss makes a joke, you laugh.
Hanenberger looked down at the Lawgiver in Dredd’s boot-holster. “You ever even fired that thing? ’Cos out here, a man who doesn’t know how to use his gun might as well trade it in for a shovel and start digging his own grave.” She stepped back from Dredd and turned around, pointing to the top of a nearby building. “See that weather-vane? If you can’t hit that from here, you’re no use to me.”
“I can hit it,” Dredd said.
“As they’re fond of saying around here, Judge, talkin’ ain’t doin’. Show me.”
“No. Waste of ammunition.”
Slowly, Hanenberger turned back to face him. “No? Judge, I own this town. You do whatever I tell you.”
Ramini said, “We’re here to help defend the town and keep the peace. Not to perform tricks for you, Miss Hanenberger. Your social status will have no influence on how we do our job.”
The woman peered at Ramini through half-closed eyes for a moment, then nodded. “Glad to hear it. Last thing I need around here is another bunch of yes-men too scared to speak up if they see something wrong.”
One of her advisors muttered, “Damn straight,” and Hanenberger threw him a withering glance before turning back to the Judges. “All right. O’Donnell here is deputy sheriff, you follow his lead. Don’t forget that you’re not in Mega-City One now—we’ve got our own laws here in Ezekiel. Screw up and you’re out.” She turned and walked away, with her entourage following her to the largest building on the edge of the plaza.
O’Donnell approached the Judges. “That went well. Okay. I’ll get you settled in. First thing tomorrow I’ll give you a tour of the town and the mine, then—”
“We’ll do it now,” Dredd said.
“No, we won’t. I went straight from a ten-hour shift to pick you up, so I’m due some down-time. Relax, Dredd. Put your feet up for the rest of the day.”
“Where are our quarters?”
“I’ve cleared out space in my basement. It’s not what you’d call five-star accommodation, just three beds, but—”
“It’ll do,” Ramini said. “We’re going to take a look around.”
“Not without me. Some of the people around here are liable to start shooting if they see Judges coming.”
Ramini picked an arbitrary direction and began to walk. Montag and Dredd fell into step beside her. “We can handle ourselves.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about,” O’Donnell called after them.
Ezekiel appeared to have been constructed on the remains of an older town; here and there Dredd spotted old moss-covered bricks and cracked paving slabs, and some of the town’s older buildings had been constructed from weather-beaten wooden panels, patched and re-patched dozens of times. Windows were small and either shuttered or made from shatter-proof glass.
The streets of Ezekiel were mostly packed dirt; during the wet season, it would be like wading through a swamp.
The Judges reached the north end of the town without encountering any people, animals or vehicles, but as they turned west toward the mine they heard two short blasts of a siren.
Montag froze. “I don’t like the sound of that. A warning siren?”
“End of shift at the mine, is my guess,” Ramini said.
Within minutes dust-covered citizens began filing out of the mine’s entrance. Others—presumably part of the next shift—were lining up outside, and as each worker exited they handed their pickaxes and shovels to the next person in line.
“Efficient,” Dredd said.
“Cost-effective, too,” Ramini replied. “Check out the mine, Dredd.”
As she and Montag walked on, Dredd stopped to watch the miners, mentally noting faces and distinguishing features. Most of them appeared to be normal, with perhaps twenty per cent showing visible mutations. One young man had a second, poorly-formed face on the side of his head, another lacked a nose or ears. A middle-aged woman who passed by was sleeveless, her arms covered in thumb-sized bumps, each bump containing something dark at its core, just beneath the skin.
While many of the citizens spotted Dredd and nudged their colleagues, the first one to approach him was a middle-aged bear of a man with a thick off-white beard and eyebrows like arctic caterpillars. “The heck is a Judge doing here?”
“Brought in to supplement the town’s security,” Dredd said. “Who are you?”
“Ishmael Stinnett. I’m the town’s preacher. Have you been saved, Judge?”
“Not interested.”
“That’s not what I asked. In the end, the Lord Grud turns his big squinty eye upon us all, even Judges. What we do in this life is an audition for the next. Our lives on Earth are the box containing the cereal, not the cereal itself, nor the awesome plastic prize within!” Stinnett pinched the back of his hand. “This flesh-cloak is merely the film canister that holds the unpleasant short, grainy travelogue that heralds the awesome all-star main feature! Do you understand? This
human existence is but the clam before the storm!”
“The clam?” Dredd asked, even though he didn’t want to be drawn into this conversation. “You mean the calm?”
“No, the clam! The oyster that holds the Pearl of Eternal Truth. ‘Give unto others and be ye not shellfish,’ sayeth the Lord, ‘for, um, its flesh be-eth foul and slimy and looketh like unto a mighty lump of snot, yea, and such.’ Praise Grud!” He reached inside his dust-covered jacket and pulled out a dog-eared pamphlet. “You should read this. I know you come from the city of the darned, but even you can be spared Grud’s hefty wrath—even for the worst sinner there is always time to repent, except right at the end when it’s too late. Praise Grud! Praise him!”
“Save your sermon for someone else,” Dredd said.
Stinnett froze, and stared at Dredd. “I said, praise him!”
“Not today.” Dredd resisted the urge to arrest the man for harassment and charge him with preaching without a licence, reminding himself that things were different out here. “Move along.”
“The wrath of Grud be on you, Judge Dredd! He sees all, he knows all! He will smite the lawless!”
“Then Grud and I have something in common.” Dredd walked away, still watching the other mine-workers.
The preacher called after him, “Big one’s coming, Judge! You better know which side you’re on! Grud knows, you bet he does!”
A dark-haired woman waiting to enter the mine said, “You’d do well to steer clear of Preacher Stinnett, Judge. Or if you can’t avoid him, just agree with anything he says. It makes things a lot easier.”
“Advice noted, citizen. You are?”
“Eloise Crow.”
“You’re a miner?”
She smiled. “Why, thank you for the compliment, kind stranger! It’s just my youthful looks.”
Dredd didn’t know what to do with that. Obviously, she was deliberately confusing the homonyms ‘miner’ and ‘minor’ for humorous effect, but he wasn’t sure why. She could be flirting, or just engaging in banter. Rico would have known the difference; he was good at that sort of thing. They’d been trained at the Academy of Law to recognise and resist attempts at flattery, but it wasn’t an area in which Dredd considered himself an expert by any stretch of the imagination.
Officially Judges were forbidden from entering into romantic relationships, but that didn’t stop some of them. And there were certainly members of the public who pursued Judges. That was something Dredd could understand: Judges were healthy, committed, and uncompromising. They were also—technically—unobtainable, and for some reason people are drawn to what they’re told they can’t have.
Rico had given in to his base urges and indulged in physical relationships, Dredd knew, and that was a sign of weakness, not to mention a potentially huge security risk. Even though the citizens should know better, Dredd himself had so far been offered sex on seventeen different occasions. Those offers had resulted in sixteen on-the-spot fines for attempted bribery and one arrest for assaulting a Judge.
When the class of ’seventy-nine were eighteen-year-old cadets, Ellard had taken Joe aside one day and said, “One of the others wants you. Physically, I mean. I’m not saying who. Just warning you, Joe. Don’t go reporting this, okay? I’m just letting you know so you can watch out for it.” Nothing had happened after that—at least, nothing Dredd had noticed—but it had troubled him a little, and he’d often wondered whether Ellard had concocted the story for personal reasons, maybe to unsettle him and throw him off his game. If that was the case, it had almost worked. Almost.
Now, Dredd looked down at Eloise Crow and wondered how he should respond, but he was saved from that dilemma by the arrival of a man of about Crow’s age, who strode up to her and slipped his arm around her waist.
The man nodded at Dredd. “I heard we were getting some Judges. Good to have you here. I’m Travis Crow, Eloise’s husband.” He leaned a little closer to Dredd. “You want to watch yourself with some of these folk, Judge. They’re not happy you’re here.”
“People with something to hide are rarely pleased to see a Judge,” Dredd said, a little relieved to be on familiar territory once more.
Eloise said, “We have ways of getting things done in Ezekiel that might not sit well with you.”
“Such as?”
She shrugged. “Hopefully you won’t have to find out.”
At the mine’s entrance, a burly woman wearing dusty, battered body-armour called out, “Aaannnd... that’s the last one! Next shift, you’re up! C’mon, get moving! Ore ain’t gonna mine itself!” She had a shotgun slung over one shoulder, and a pair of powerful-looking handguns on her hips, the same models as Hanenberger’s bodyguards used.
The Crows nodded to Dredd once more, then followed their colleagues into the mine.
Dredd walked up to the burly woman. She was perhaps sixty years old, and kept watch on the miners as she greeted him. Past her, further into the mine, he could see at least four more similarly-dressed women.
“So you’re the bump in the town’s security. Just three Judges.”
“Yes,” Dredd said. “Who are you?”
“Santiago, mine supervisor.”
“You’re a mercenary.”
She shrugged. “No law against that, is there?”
“Not out here.” Dredd moved to step past her into the mine, but she put out her arm to stop him.
“No unsupervised access.”
“Then supervise me.”
Santiago called to one of her colleagues to take her place, then walked side-by-side with Dredd through the winding, low-ceilinged tunnel.
“Smooth walls,” Dredd observed. “Cut with a laser.”
“Right. This was an ore seam, the first one discovered. Hanenberger’s father saw it, bought up the land. They used lasers to melt the rock and free the iridium at the same time, followed the seam right back.” She rapped her gloved knuckles on one of the metal pillars lining the walls. “Support beams are steel, but back at the entrance they’re cast from solid iridium. Worth a fortune—old man Hanenberger likes to give a good impression to prospective customers. Last thing we’ll do before we shut this place down is rip them out.”
They emerged from the winding tunnel at the top level of a seemingly bottomless cavern, over a hundred metres across at its widest point. The nexus of dozens of side-tunnels of varying diameter, the cavern was criss-crossed with walkways and platforms, ladders and gangplanks, crude elevators and suspended platforms, all strung together with thick ropes, cables and old scaffolding poles. Right now, between shifts, there were very few people to be seen, but it was easy for Dredd to picture the mine at its busiest, with hundreds of workers shifting tonnes of ore.
Santiago said, “This was a natural cavern. Hanenberger wasn’t big on spending money, so once he found this and saw all the ore seams, he sold off the lasers and hired locals instead. Built up the town outside.”
Dredd stepped to the edge of the platform and peered down into the darkness. “This was within the bounds of Mega-City One, I’d shut the place down. I can see a hundred health-code violations without even turning my head. How many workers have fallen to their deaths here, Santiago?”
She shrugged. “All of them, I guess.”
“What?”
“Anyone who falls down there isn’t getting back up. It’s about six hundred metres down, I’m told. Never been inclined to find out.”
“Should have nets strung across the cavern every four metres.”
“Maybe. But life out here is very different to the city, Judge. The Hanenbergers rule with an iridium fist in an iron glove. Don’t let Alfonsa’s pleasant nature fool you. When she gets worked up into a frenzy, heads start to roll.”
“Not literally, I hope,” Dredd said.
The woman turned to look at him for the first time. “Yes. Literally.”
Seven
THE FIRST FIGHT broke out as the sun was setting, in the larger of Ezekiel’s two taverns, the Brazen Hussy,
a squat, single-storey building on the eastern edge of the town.
Ramini and Montag were resting in the Judges’ makeshift quarters in the basement of Brian O’Donnell’s house; Dredd had elected to take the night-shift.
He stood in the doorway of the tavern watching the citizens. Most were sitting in clusters of three or four and drinking what he took to be alcohol-based drinks—real alcohol was illegal in Mega-City One, but not out here. A few loners sat at the bar, staring into their drinks. One woman sat slumped face-down in a puddle of liquid, and a man sat with his back to the bar, apparently trying to look suave and desirable.
The barman—a topless, muscular man covered in tattoos—looked over at Dredd and called, “Hey, one of the Judges! What’ll it be, Judge?”
“What’ll what be?” Dredd asked, aware that almost every conversation in the large room had stopped and most of the patrons had turned to look at him.
“What are you drinking?” the barman asked. “First one’s on the house.”
“I don’t consume intoxicants,” Dredd said. “Just carry on about your business.”
They were a strange group of people, Dredd thought. He’d visited much of Mega-City One, even spent some time in a mutant town during his cadet days, but this was something he’d never expected to see: mutants and normals socialising together, treating each other more or less as equals.
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