The Cold Light of Day

by Michael Carroll

  “Dredd to Control. I require an air-lift. Get a H-wagon to my location ASAP.”

  “Nearest available H-Wagon is in Sector 40, Dredd. ETA fifteen minutes.”

  “Not good enough. Find the closest unavailable one and make it available.”

  “You’re still looking at twelve minutes minimum, Dredd. What’s your destination?”

  “Joanne Vanderbilt Block, Sector 179.” Already, Dredd could hear the roar of the crowd gathered around the race’s route.

  “Understood. I’ll—” The voice of Control was cut off, and another voice said, “Dredd—this is supervisor Walton. Word from Judge Meacham at Vanderbilt. Citizen Morante is dead. Meacham is in pursuit of two male suspects, one matching the description of your perp. They’re still in the block. I’ve ordered it to be sealed but current response times are slow.”

  “Drokk...” Dredd focussed on the road ahead. To get from his current location to Joanne Vanderbilt Block, he’d have to cross the race line at some point. There were underpasses and flyovers, but nothing that wouldn’t take him too far out of the way. The fastest route was straight through. “Walton, I’m westbound on Avenue Double-A, four minutes ten away from the track.”

  “I see you, Dredd. But—”

  “Order the crowd-marshals to clear me a path through to the track, and shift the barriers wide enough for me to pass through. Two metres should be enough. Same on the other side. I’m cutting across the track.”

  “Recommend against that action, Dredd. The race leaders have just emerged from The Crowbar, and right now they’re going hell-for-leather to establish their positions. That’s a four-hundred kilometre stretch... By the time they reach your position they’ll be touching five hundred KPH. Cutting across them would be—”

  “You’d better be getting it done while you’re talking to me, Walton,” Dredd snarled. “Three minutes fifty.”

  Walton muttered, “Grud-damn it...” and began shouting orders. “It’s in progress, Dredd. No guarantees. You hit the barriers at the speed you’re going and there’ll be another Judge for us to bury, if we can find all the pieces.”

  Ahead of Dredd, Avenue Double-A straightened out, giving him a clear run to the race’s route.

  AS HE PEELED out of the last curve on The Crowbar, Shock slammed on his Blenderbike’s accelerator and afterburners at the same time. Ahead of him, Vavavoom Grupp was in sixth place, less than a second behind Travis Cannon.

  Behind Shock, Napoleon was coming up fast, his custom-built machine sailing past Aposcar Kresky in eighth as though he were standing still.

  Napoleon and the other surviving Muties had been bombarding Shock with obscenities and threats constantly since the accident in The Crowbar, and Shock’s screen showed that public opinion had completely turned against him.

  Even if he won the race, he’d be despised. There would be no big-name sponsorship deals.

  For a moment, he considered pulling out. There was still time to pretend that he hadn’t grasped the extent of the crash. He might just be able to get out of this mess and save face. Might even find a way to persuade everyone that his brake light came on as the result of a malfunction, not a deliberate action.

  But now he wanted to win. He wanted that more than the money any sponsorship deals might bring. He wanted to win so that next time he met that smug drokker Napoleon Neapolitan face-to-face, he could brush it off like it was no big thing.

  And it wasn’t just for him. The Spacers was one of the city’s largest biker gangs. A thousand members were rooting for him, desperate to finally shut those damn Muties up once and for all.

  A warning message flashed on his screen: “Caution—track compromised! Cut speed and prepare to stop!”

  Yeah, right, Shock thought. Easy enough to hack into a bike’s computer and send fake messages. Clever trick, Napoleon, but you’re not fooling me.

  He wiped the warning message off the screen and called up the positions. Napoleon was in eighth place now, only a kilometre behind Shock, and maintaining his speed. All of the other racers were slowing down.

  Okay, that’s not good, Shock thought. If the warning was real, then—

  Directly ahead of him, something large, dark and fast streaked across the track.

  Shock swore and slammed on his brakes. The Blenderbike’s speed dropped to three hundred, two hundred, one-fifty...

  And Napoleon Neapolitan’s giant-wheeled monstrosity shot past him.

  “Drokker!” Shock screamed. He jerked back on the accelerator again, ramped it up to full speed as he passed a barely-glimpsed gap in the barrier. Napoleon was already a dot in the distance.

  DREDD’S LAWMASTER ROARED along Avenue Double-A and he tried not to notice the horrified expressions on the thirty-citizen-deep crowd as he approached the narrow gap the Judges had forced between them.

  Three more Judges were heaving frantically at the temporary barrier, trying to shift it aside before Dredd reached them. Dredd knew he could tear it to shreds with his bike’s cannons, but that would be disastrous for anyone standing nearby. He eased his fingers toward the Lawmaster’s brakes, though he knew that at this speed he’d never be able to stop in time.

  With a last shove, the three Judges shifted the barrier just barely wide enough for the Lawmaster: it lost some chrome as it passed through, and then Dredd was darting across the track toward the gap on the other side, aware that any number of fast-moving bikers could be barrelling toward him from the right.

  He kept his eyes straight ahead. No point looking—if one of the bikers was going to crash into him, at the speed they were all travelling he’d get a fraction of a second of warning, nowhere near enough time to get clear.

  Then he was on the other side, his Lawmaster coming within a centimetre of clipping one of the Judges who was trying to keep the crowd back.

  “I’m through,” Dredd said to Control.

  “I see that,” Walton said. “Damn. Should have had money on you, Dredd.”

  “Gambling’s illegal, Walton. What’s the situation with Chalk?”

  “Still not confirmed that it is him. Judge Meacham’s got the suspects pinned down in the block’s multi-storey parking lot. He reports that the suspects are armed. All interior cams are down. No fault reports logged—must have just happened.”

  Dredd slowed his bike to ease it around a corner. “Send Meacham’s current position to my bike and patch me through to him.” He ramped up the speed again. Joanne Vanderbilt Block was directly ahead.

  “Meacham here,” a voice over the radio said.

  “Meacham, this is Dredd. I’m your back-up. Status?”

  “Parking lot’s full—overflowing, in fact. I’m on level twenty-six. Perps are somewhere above me. All exits are sealed. The only way out is through me.”

  “Acknowledged. ETA two minutes. Don’t let him get past you.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  Joanne Vanderbilt Block was a mid-sized building, ninety storeys tall, clad in polished plasteen—designed to be resistant to graffiti and general weathering—and home to over one hundred thousand citizens. Running vertically through the building’s core was its parking lot. Although few of the block’s citizens actually owned vehicles, they still guarded their parking spots with extreme vigour and took great offence to anyone using them. Except on occasions like the Mega-City 5000, when the residents hung a huge, hand-painted banner from the roof announcing that parking for the day was available at only twenty credits per vehicle, per hour.

  The fifty-metre-high banner flapped gently in the breeze, matching those of the surrounding blocks.

  Dredd had read the reports of last year’s race: in Sector 86, one particularly enterprising block manager had locked access to the parking lot an hour before the race ended, and gone to the movies. Sixteen thousand vehicle owners had been forced to wait an extra three hours before they could retrieve their cars. Three extra hours meant an extra sixty credits per vehicle, netting him a nice bonus of almost a million credits in c
ash. He’d kept half, divided the rest between the block’s residents and everyone was happy, until one of them killed him and took his half too.

  As Dredd’s bike hit the intake-ramp for Joanne Vanderbilt Block, the ground trembled and almost immediately his radio came to life once more. “Dredd... Meacham. Damn, these guys are hard-core. And they’re seriously packing. Grenade-launcher and Grud only knows what else. Two of us aren’t going to be enough.” Another explosion rippled through the building, and above Dredd several windows shattered, showering the ramp ahead of him with crystalline shrapnel. “Stomm! A couple more like that and they’ll bring the block down!”

  Dredd skidded his bike to a stop. “Fall back, Meacham. Let them see a way out—it’ll be easier and safer to take them out in the open.” He could already hear screams from within the block.

  Meacham’s voice came back, softer now. “All right... they’re going past me... Vehicle’s big, armoured, I think. Looks like a Chameleon, ten years old maybe. Dredd, that thing’s going to smash through anything you put in front of it. Nothing short of a H-wagon is going to be able to stop it.”

  “I know the model,” Dredd said. “Built for use in the Cursed Earth. Doesn’t have a lot of speed.”

  “I don’t know about that... It’s moving pretty damn fast right now.”

  Dredd heard the roar of the Chameleon’s engine and the screech of its tyres as it rumbled and scraped its way down the parking lot’s interior ramps. “Control—you following this?”

  “We are,” Judge Walton said. After a slight pause, he said, “Dredd, not good news. The Chameleon is registered to Meredith Rousseau. She was senior mechanic on Chalk’s scavenging team. She wasn’t present at his arrest in Eminence—safe to assume she’s one of the few who didn’t side against him. A month ago Rousseau bought—”

  The entire ramp shook and buckled as something powerful exploded inside the block. Dredd looked up: directly above him, the block’s plasteen facade was cracking. He spun his bike about, and roared down to the street, moments before a five-tonne chunk of steel-reinforced plasteen slammed onto the ramp.

  High above, through the billowing dust, Dredd saw the Chameleon crashing through the wall. It tumbled as it plummeted, straight down toward the shattered ramp.

  And then its descent slowed. The two-tonne, armour-plated vehicle quickly righted itself, and soared over Dredd’s head, rapidly gathering speed as it headed toward the crowds gathered to watch the Mega-City 5000.

  “Dredd? Dredd, you read me?”

  Dredd fired up the Lawmaster and peeled off in pursuit of the massive flying craft. “I read you, Walton.”

  “Don’t know if you caught that last part... A month ago Rousseau bought fourteen reconditioned skysurf anti-grav motors.”

  “Yeah,” Dredd said. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  SHOCK’S SCREEN TOLD him that Napoleon Neapolitan was thirty-one kilometres ahead, in third place, when the bulky vehicle passed overhead, following the path of the race. For a second, he thought it was a H-wagon—and there was a fleeting moment when he saw himself being arrested for causing the crash in The Crowbar—but it was the wrong colour, the wrong shape.

  And it certainly shouldn’t have been there.

  Muties, he thought. Has to be. Though they were genetically normal, the team mostly operated in the Cursed Earth—hence their nickname—where the terrain was rough and the weather appalling. They were good, too, there was no denying that. They knew how to cope with pretty much anything. It was said that Napoleon Neapolitan himself had once travelled on foot from Mega-City Two to Texas City, a journey that few people would have the courage or the tenacity to take behind the wheel of an armoured truck.

  But the Spacers were tough too. Many of them, like Shock, had spent years working in the asteroid belt, or on the Lunar colonies. Tooling around on your bike in the Cursed Earth was one thing, driving a skimmer towing a million-tonne iron-ore asteroid from the belt to the moon was quite another.

  The flying vehicle—Shock didn’t recognise the make or model, but then he rarely saw them from this angle—was fast, approaching supersonic speed, and ahead he saw it veer sharply to the right. What the hell? He’s following the race route!

  Another two vehicles zoomed overhead, followed quickly by a third, then a fourth and fifth close together. Justice Department Hover-Wagons, definitely recognisable from below. And at the speed they were travelling, Shock guessed they were in pursuit of the first craft.

  If this was a Mutie tactic, Shock couldn’t see where it was leading. He called up his race-planner on the comm-link. “Amanda, what the drokk is happening?”

  “No idea, Shock. The Jays are all going nuts; there’s talk of shutting down the race. Might not be a bad thing right now—you’ll be hard pressed to catch Napoleon at this rate.”

  “I’m not letting that Mutie drokker win. Not this time.”

  “Figured as much. You’re faster than he is, but it’s not going to be enough unless something slows him down.”

  “The rest of the team?”

  “Endrian’s just made it out of The Crowbar. She’s riding well. Tiny chance she’ll catch up with you. The rest of them are close behind her, but they’re not likely to place. You want a Spacer victory, it’s up to you to take it. Your machine holding up?”

  “Everything’s still in the green.”

  “Then keep on Napoleon until we hear that the race is shut down. He’s still got Silver and Cannon to pass, and Silver’s got a four-second lead on him. Odds are he’ll take her before they reach Sector 141. By that stage you want to be no more than eight seconds behind him.”

  DREDD’S LAWMASTER ROARED back through the gap in the crowd and again clipped the edge of one of the barriers, but it was a glancing blow, barely enough to slow him down. Now he was on the track, following the route, gradually gaining on one of the riders. “Control...”

  “Sorry, Dredd,” Walton said. “We shut the race down now, we’ll be looking at a hundred-million-strong riot.”

  “What’s the status on Chalk?”

  “Spy-cams have positively identified him as the driver of the Chameleon. We’ve got two of the H-Wagons locked on but if they open fire—”

  “The debris will rain down on the crowd,” Dredd said. “Chalk knows that. That’s why he’s following the route.”

  “We’ve got the results of the DNA test on the diner shootings... Two of the grenade victims are on the list Moeller gave you. Squire and Kinsley. That leaves only one... Winston Fierro, resident of the Abbitat Habitat, Sector 115. Dredd, that’s on the race’s route, the last major turn before the finish-line.” A map of the route appeared on Dredd’s screen. At Sector 102, four hundred kilometres from Dredd’s current position, the route took a turn to the right, heading west until it reached the edge of Sector 141, where it took a meandering south-east path back to Sector 115. Then came the last stretch, a two-hundred-kilometre run down to Sector 124, the southernmost tip of the city.

  “Tell me you’ve already got a squad on the way to pick up Fierro.” Dredd activated his bike’s sirens as he reached the racer, the celebrity rider Jeremiah Kentson, who stared open-mouth at Dredd as he steadily cruised past him.

  “Affirmative,” Walton said. “Expecting a report from them any minute. If Chalk is going to stick to the route, you can exit the track at Sector 102 and cut across MegSouth to 115. That’ll take close to seven hundred kilometres off your journey. I’ll have the Judges at 102 prepare an exit route for you.”

  “Understood.” Dredd wondered why Control was being so cooperative all of a sudden, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Stopping Percival Chalk was the only thing he should be focusing on right now.

  What’s his end-game? Dredd asked himself. He knows we’re after him. There’s no way he can escape. Even if he heads out into the Cursed Earth, the H-wagons are more than capable of following him.

  And there was something else niggling at the back of Dredd’s mind... the Chameleon was running on AG
motors designed for skysurf boards, and the Chameleon was a lot heavier than a board and its rider. Even fourteen AG motors wouldn’t be able to power a vehicle of that mass for longer than a couple of hours, and that was only if the Chameleon wasn’t carrying anything heavy. Dredd estimated that Chalk still had over nine hundred kilometres to go before the route hit Sector 115. At five hundred KPH, he was going to be cutting it close.

  And then what? He’s got to know by now that we’re anticipating his targets.

  IN HER ROOM in the Justice Department Med Centre, Judge Amber Ruiz flipped the TV screen to Channel Epsilon. Her wounds had been sealed and her torso was encased in a rapid-heal unit, and even though she’d been anaesthetised from the chest down, she was sure she could feel the machine’s needles and scalpels working away inside her.

  There was no longer any pain, and for that she was grateful. In her career as a Judge she’d been shot eighteen times, but this one had been by far the worst.

  “Now, Peter,” one of Channel Epsilon’s unseen commentators said, “no doubt you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, and I wouldn’t blame you, but isn’t this an unusual turn of events?”

  “A Judge on the track? Indeed it is, Ted. I don’t think we’ve seen a Judge on the track before.”

  Ruiz shook her head in dismay. The man is fearless. She’d been following the case from the moment she regained consciousness.

  The screen cut to a close-up of Dredd, sitting grim-faced on his Lawmaster as it hurtled past the baffled crowds. “I’m wondering...” the first commentator said, “well, he’s moving pretty fast there—viewers at home, you can see on your screens that he’s close to five hundred kilometres per hour—and I’m wondering, at this late stage in the race, can he win?”