Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  He turned and stalked away, back to the vent. Behind him, Bane sagged.

  An invisible killing machine in front of her and a troupe of bickering, trigger-happy fascists behind? Gethsemane Bane was beginning to think that exile would have been the easy option.

  Unlike the Warchild, neither Bane nor the intruders had the strength to simply stop the fan and climb past the shattered blade. Dredd favoured putting a bullet through the motor but Peyton saved him the ammunition by tracking down the main power supply and shorting out the connections.

  The fan whined slowly to a halt, rattling on its damaged bearings as the missing blade threw it off-balance. Dredd caught it once it was slow enough and hauled it to a stop. Thankfully, he didn't make Bane go through first.

  He made her go second. "All clear," she heard from inside the duct. "Send the mutant through."

  She climbed in gingerly, aware that the missing fan blade had left razor-sharp shards of metal sticking out from the hub. The rest of it, she saw once she was through, lay in dozens of scattered fragments all over the duct floor. Some of them had embedded themselves in the walls.

  The rest of the team followed her in. The duct was big enough to stand up in and constructed from heavy gauge steel. It still rang like a gong as soon as anyone took a step, and echoed horribly. "Say goodbye to a stealthy approach," said Larson ruefully.

  "You won't be creeping up on it anyway, mister," Hellermann said from just inside the grille. Bane had noticed that the Judges were always careful never to let her get behind everyone else. As though they thought she might make a break for it. "It's got hearing that would shame a bat."

  "You're proud of it," said Bane, in spite of herself. Hellerman gave her a withering glare.

  "At least I have something to be proud of, mutant."

  "Screw you." Bane turned her back on the woman and walked ahead a few metres. "Are you guys coming, or are you just going to stand there arguing about who's got the biggest helmet?"

  "Hey. Hey!" Vix was striding up behind her. Bane felt a gloved hand come down on her shoulder. "Don't get mouthy with us, girl. We're the ones who're going to save this cesspool of a city!"

  "Oh yeah?" Maybe Vix was used to browbeating rookies or juves off the street, but Gethsemane Bane, for all her lack of years, was a captain of a Black Atlantic scavenger, and she got tired of her attitude very quickly. She threw the hand off and spun on her heel.

  "Okay, skull-head," she snarled. "Riddle me this - two corners away down this vent shaft are three exits. They slope down at a real sharp angle, and they all look the same. One of them leads to the service ladder, the others don't. Which one are you going down?"

  The outburst seemed to bring Vix up short. "Ah, the middle one?"

  Bane made a buzzing noise in her throat. "Is the wrong answer! You're in the water, skull-head. And that's gonna burn that uniform off your ass pretty drokking quick."

  She noticed that Dredd was suddenly next to them, not saying anything, just standing there with his arms folded. She hadn't even heard his approach.

  Up close, he was big. Quint was bigger, but even the skipper didn't have the aura of raw command this man had. So far, she realised, he'd just chosen not to use it.

  "Finished?" he said.

  Bane nodded. Vix lowered her gaze and stepped back.

  "Good." His voice level and even. "Defensive formation, Hellermann and Peyton in the centre. Bane, you and I are on point. Larson and Adams, watch our backs. Anyone tries getting into a pissing contest again and you'll have me to answer to when we get back to the Meg." He pointed to Bane. "Except for you. You'll answer to me right here. Now let's move!"

  To get to all the areas of the harbour barge, the vent had been built in a series of sloping corners and wide loops. The team had been moving through the duct for about five minutes when Bane rounded a corner and saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks.

  In the centre of the duct was a seething puddle of fur. Rats; dozens of them, as big as her forearm. They were feeding.

  She could hear the steady crunching of teeth on bone.

  Dredd had pulled his gun - a bulky, blunt-nosed automatic with a rotary indicator above the trigger. Bane had just enough time to get her hands over her ears before he pulled the trigger.

  The gun thumped heavily in his fist and one of the rats flew apart. Bane felt the noise of the shot slam into her eardrums, even past her clasped hands. The rest of the rats were already gone, a scuttling, screeching mass whirling away down the duct.

  Dredd walked up to the object they had been feasting on. "Looks like number fifteen didn't get away after all."

  For a moment Bane couldn't grasp what she was seeing. Dredd was talking as though it was a body, but it couldn't be, could it? It was far too small and the wrong shape. Then her brain made sense of the image and her stomach flipped.

  It wasn't an entire body. Everything below a ragged line diagonally across the torso, taking off one arm, was missing. What was left had been chewed to ruin by the rats.

  "Peyton!" Dredd barked. "Hold onto your lunch and take a look at this."

  Warily, the shorter Judge joined Dredd. "Grud," he whispered, just once. Then he knelt down by the carcass.

  "Bite marks," he said, pointing at the torso. Bane, hanging back, didn't want to see in detail. "Big ones, not the rats. He's been chewed through here, here and here. This is a straight cut."

  "So what are you saying?" asked Adams, obviously horrified. "It's eating people now?"

  Dredd crouched by the corpse and reached down to the torn neck. He tugged something free and brought it up to the light.

  It was a slender needle, as long as a finger, and carved from pale bone.

  "Toxin dart," Dredd muttered. "Shot this one and brought him along as a packed lunch."

  Peyton nodded. "It needed to feed. But it waited until it was safe then ate what it could and left the rest."

  "Which tells you what?"

  "It's planning a lot of... activity" Peyton bit his lip.

  Vix nudged the corpse with her boot. "At least we know we're going the right way."

  "From here," Bane said, "there's only one way we can go. It's when we get on deck we have to start thinking."

  She led them through the duct, luckily without further incident. By the time they got out of the harbour barge, night had fallen and a storm wind was whipping at the deck.

  Bane came up first, climbing the service ladder she'd quizzed Vix about. Dredd was next to her in a second, scanning the deck with a flashlight clipped to his gun. Within a few moments the whole team was up, moving smoothly into a spread pattern, everyone covering everyone else's back.

  The Judges' guns had integral viewfinders at the rear, above the grip. Bane caught a flash of Dredd's as he swung the weapon about and saw an instant of brilliant blues and greens. Thermal imaging. "Will it show up on that?"

  "Probably not. Everyone else will, though."

  Bane had to plant her feet apart against the wind. It was rising to a gale, whipping her coat about. "We're not all against you, Judge! The word will have gone out by now - news travels fast here."

  "Forgive me if I'm still not expecting open arms. Which way?"

  She pointed. "You can't get to the ship ahead directly from this one. No bridge." She turned her head to the side as spray blew at her. "We'll have to go starboard, to the Castiglione. From there to the Mirabelle, that's starboard too. But that's the last anyone saw of it. I don't understand why we didn't start there."

  "You don't need to. After the Mirabelle, where then?"

  Bane shrugged. "You tell me where you want to go, Judge, and I'll get you there. But tracking this thing is your job."

  "That's right. It is. Which is why I needed to start back at the vent."

  There were eight bridges from the harbour barge to the Castiglione, but most were too slender and unstable to use in the storm. Bane led the team downwards, using the mesh stairways that zigzagged down the side of the barge, until she re
ached the Bridge of Calm. Some weird pattern in the air-currents around the cityship caused a dead spot there. No matter how hard the wind blew, the Bridge of Calm was always rock steady.

  As such, it was a common romantic spot for courting couples. But there were no lovers on the bridge tonight, just nervous skipper's men. Bane led the team quickly across and into the Castiglione.

  A giant hydroponics farm took up most of the Castiglione's internal space and they were able to move through that vessel quickly. But the Mirabelle, into which the Warchild had disappeared, was a different matter.

  "It's a residential ship," Bane explained, as they moved through the short tunnel installed between the inner and outer hulls. "The habs are mostly cargo containers, shipped down there and welded together. I used to live there a long time ago."

  "Where do you live now?" asked Larson.

  "On the Golgotha. Well, I used to. Right now, I don't know."

  "It depends on the outcome of our mission," Dredd told her. "If we succeed, you get your ship back. If we don't, it doesn't matter."

  "I hadn't thought of it like that," said Bane. Her voice sounded very small.

  The tunnel opened onto the lower deck of the Mirabelle. Bane stepped out of the hatchway and into open, smoky air. Behind her, she heard one of the Judges - Peyton, she was sure - give a low whistle.

  She had to admit the Mirabelle was impressive in a certain way.

  The chamber they now stood in was forty metres high, from the mesh deck to the roof braces. It stretched away in every direction for a much larger distance, but it was impossible to see how far - thousands of cooking fires had turned the air into a thick, pungent smog.

  Stacked from floor to ceiling were the habs: ten metre cargo containers, bolted one on top of the other and side by side, in some places ten or more high. Open mesh walkways ringed every level of every stack, connected by an insane spider web of ladders and stairs. Washing lines were strung between the walkways, dripping processions of laundry hanging from them like limp flags. The walkways were strewn with potted plants, bicycles, children's toys, and garbage of every description - the accumulated detritus of human existence, poured into a big metal box and left to rot.

  Great halogen lamps strung from the ceiling cast a sickly glow at street level, but most of the light came from windows. Rough cut squares glowed in every hab, far too many to count. Most of them also showed the silhouettes of watching figures.

  Five thousand people lived in this compartment, and Mirabelle had four compartments. Even so, there was no one about on the streets or up on the walkways. Bane had never seen the vessel so empty.

  She turned to the Judges. "Okay," she began, "now listen to me. This is a low cost residential area. I'm sure you have them in your city too. If you do, you'll know that there are places you go, and places you only go in pairs, right? Same here. I'll lead you through the safest way, but we go quickly, we go quietly, and we don't make any trouble."

  "No argument," said Dredd. "If the Warchild came through here, it didn't stop. We'd know about it by now."

  They began to move into the stacks. Bane knew that the biggest spaces between the habs would be the safest, as more light filtered down to the deck on the widest streets. She led them quickly around several corners, skirting an area she knew contained six dead ends and four taverns, and another where the lights were constantly being knocked out by juves on the top hab roofs.

  Bane was heading for the Main Drag, a wide street that carved almost clear through the centre of the hold. She took the team along a row of small shop-fronts to get there, but when she turned the next corner it was blocked.

  Someone had piled scrap metal into the space between two habs. There was tonnes of it, mainly rusted H-girders, but the gaps were filled with a lot of broken sheet steel and plasteen. Metre-long spikes of grimy metal stuck out from the girders at every angle. Climbing over the blockage would be impossible without getting impaled, or crushed as the whole unstable lot of it collapsed.

  Bane didn't find either choice attractive. "They're barricading themselves in," she told Dredd. "They're terrified of the Warchild."

  "No surprise there," the Judge replied. "Find us another way, fast."

  She lead them back the way they had come, then took a different turning. Around the next corner she found the same result.

  On the third roadblock she gave in. "No way through, not without getting ourselves torn up. We'll have to back onto the upper deck, see where we can get from there."

  "And if the Warchild is in the middle of that lot?" asked Vix.

  "As Dredd pointed out, I think we'd know about it by now." She walked past the group and back towards the tunnel. "Come on."

  "Wait," called Vix. "Dredd, there may be another way. A couple of Hi-Exes should bring one of these barricades down, then we could go where we pleased."

  Bane looked back and saw Dredd pondering the nearest roadblock. "Civilian casualties?"

  "Probably minimal."

  Then the air shifted.

  Gethsemane Bane had been born with certain mutations and had developed others during her life on the Atlantic. Her tough skin, with its blue-steel sheen, had been with her since childhood. Another was a certain sensitivity to air vibrations and weather patterns.

  It made her an exceptional sailor. Right now, it also told her that something terrible was about to happen.

  She leapt at Dredd, yelling. She was fast, too, always had been. Certainly faster and stronger than he and his Judges had considered. He had barely turned towards the sound of her shout when she barrelled into him.

  He went off-balance, but instantly corrected, only being driven back a metre or so. Vix went further because as Bane hit Dredd she'd also kicked back at the same time, catching the skull-head Judge below the ribs. All the breath went out of Vix in one go and she crashed backwards into a hab.

  There was a massive, ringing pain across Bane's skull. Dredd had backhanded her away, slamming her across the deck and before she'd even hit the mesh his gun was centred on her heart.

  Behind him, the first girder shrieked into the deck where he had been standing.

  Another one came down next to it, huge and crudely sharpened. It punched into the mesh with a deafening howl of torn metal, tilted sideways, and was smashed flat by the next five girders that came down after it.

  Bane was sitting on the deck, her head whirling from Dredd's blow. He'd hit her very hard indeed, she realised, and before she knew it the floor was tilting up behind her and hitting her in the back of the head.

  Metal was still falling from the sky. Instead of girders, it looked like about two tonnes of nuts and bolts in a chain net.

  Coming down right on top of her.

  Far away, on another ship entirely, the Old Man woke from his slumber.

  He had been asleep for a long time, since just after Gethsemane Bane had left. Reaching out through the multiple hulls and decks of Sargasso to find Can-Rat had been difficult enough. Worse still had been the waves of pain and fear that had come back up the connection to hit him.

  He'd managed to hide the worst of their effects from Bane, but after she'd gone it was all he could do to make it back to his bed and collapse on it. He was sure that several bottles of offering spirit had been broken on that stumbling journey, a loss he would mourn later.

  He blinked in the darkness. Hours must have passed. His guards had turned the lights out.

  There was something ticking away at the back of his mind. Something that hadn't been there when he had gone to sleep.

  A presence...

  He reached out. A new mind had arrived on Sargasso, several new minds. Only one was of any interest to the Old Man, however.

  "Dredd? Judge Dredd?"

  It wasn't possible. The Old Man sat up, shaking off the last of his fatigue. He reached out again and found a mind made of steel.

  The Old Man was no telepath. He had never read a thought in his life. But minds made ripples in the stranger surfaces of his wo
rld, like stones thrown into sump oil. Dredd's mind was like cold metal; utterly unyielding, totally hard. Unbreakable. To a psyker who sought out minds directly, the lawman would have been a blank as he was immune to such effects. But the Old Man's powers were far more subtle. He saw the oil, not the stone.

  The Old Man felt a wide, predatory grin spread across his face. "Judge Dredd," he chortled. "This is a turn-up for the books, and no mistake."

  He reached down and fumbled in the dark until his fingers brushed a bottle. Metal charms chimed against his knuckles as he lifted the bottle and twisted the lid off. It was the bottle Bane had brought him. He lifted it in salute.

  "To Judge Joe Dredd," he laughed quietly. "Who I never thought I'd see again."

  11. THE FALL OF THE GODS

  "We shouldn't be out here," grumbled Sanny Fane. "They should give us guns if we're going to be out here."

  Sanny was griping because he'd lost three rounds of rock-scissors-paper and thus was going down the access stairs first. Voley, who'd only lost two, was at the rear, and she could see Sanny's head turning left and right like a scanner dish, trying to see everywhere at once.

  Personally, Voley thought that the stairway was probably the safest place to be because it was right out in the centre of the Royale Bisley's main deck. Suspended from the ceiling girders, it took workers all the way from distribution on the upper hull to the maintenance level fifty metres below in one huge, narrow flight of open mesh steps.

  No place for anyone suffering from vertigo, but it gave the only uninterrupted view of the Bisley's interior.

  Lox was going down second. He was three metres tall and there wasn't a single part of his body, head included, that Voley couldn't have circled with two hands. His ear-defenders had to be modified specially. "Guns wouldn't help," he said, ducking under a support brace. "Thirty guys from the Black Whale went after it with harpoon rifles and it took them all down."