"I heard that," nodded Sanny. "Reckon the thing's the size of a hab."
Lox leaned right down to him. "Long Sally from B-shift? Her sister goes with one of the skipper's men, and he said that they found the Tusk Brothers snapped clean in two!"
"Yeah," grinned Della Satori. "But anyone on the ship could snap you in two, Lox." She shook her head and turned back to give Voley a wink. "Grud, you guys are so full of it."
"Drokk you, Della," snapped Sanny. "If we're full of it, why did Quint call Mega-City One for a platoon of Judges, eh?"
"Guys?" Voley didn't talk much, so when she did the others tended to stop and listen. Sanny, in fact, stopped so suddenly that Lox almost tripped over him.
"Look, maybe this thing's as big as a hab, or maybe it's one futsie with a blade. But let's walk this shift together, okay?"
"That'll take four times as long," said Lox, gently.
Voley's long tail twitched. "Not if we go four times as fast."
Back in the day, Royale Bisley had been an anti-pollution ship. A century ago it had trawled the waters of the United States coastline, one of a vast fleet attempting to stem the tide of industrial waste seeping into the Atlantic. They had failed, of course. No fleet would have been large enough to deal with that amount of liquid garbage.
Now the vessel served a far more effective purpose. The huge pumps mounted in its blunt prow still dragged in thousands of litres of seawater a second, but certain other elements had been reversed in their function. Instead of housing the pollution and releasing clean water back into the sea, Royale Bisley and its sister vessels now did exactly the opposite. Together, the four ships provided clean drinking water for the entire cityship.
The system was largely automated, but it was also vital. Lack of water could wipe out Sargasso in a week. So every thirty minutes, the maintenance shift walked the length and breadth of the plant, checking the readouts on every filter, pump and boiler. And when that was done, they started all over again.
Whether there was a monster loose in the city or not.
Standard shift pattern was to start at the bow and work back. There were four pumps in Bisley's nose, and four sets of initial filters - gleaming steel cylinders as big as scavenger ships set on their ends. Each pump sent water back through three separate filters, only merging the flow when the water was clear enough to go into the big central boiler. And that was only halfway through the system.
There was a lot to check.
D-shift usually took a pump each, but not today. They ran through the system in a tight group, ear-defenders clamped on hard to protect their hearing, soaked with sweat almost instantly. The filtration plant was ancient, and as a result, it was big and hot and deafeningly loud. The shift had become adept at communicating in sign language.
It was Voley who first noticed something was wrong. She had been on D-shift for almost six years and she knew the pressure tolerances on the filter cylinders like she knew her own heartbeat. As soon as she looked at the reading on C-3, she knew something was amiss.
Voley skittered to a halt and went back to the cylinder readout. There was a big, easy-to-read display, and a smaller, more detailed version next to it. Voley had to climb a short ladder to get to that as she was very small at only a metre high.
The rest of the shift had stopped as soon as they realised she wasn't with them. They clustered around the base of the ladder. Lox didn't have to climb anything, of course. "Grud," he yelled, over the hammering din of the pumps. "Ten per cent down!"
Voley leaned back on the ladder, craning her neck to see the top of the cylinder. It stretched up above her, gleaming damply in the Bisley's dim internal lighting. She couldn't see anything amiss and was about to climb back down and call a supervisor when a fat drop of water hit her between the eyes.
It hit quite hard, slapping her back a little. She blinked, feeling the water running down her face, then scampered quickly up the ladder.
Heights didn't worry Voley, which was a good thing, since she didn't see anything of interest until she was at least twenty metres above the maintenance deck. At that height, the cylinder had already begun to curve inwards at the side, forming a blunt dome. It was here, where the metal skin of the filter could no longer be seen from the deck, where Voley found a hole.
She had been expecting corrosion, or maybe a split seam. Both had happened in the past. This, however, could only have been an act of deliberate sabotage. Something massively sharp had been simply punched through the metal, clear through both the outer and inner skins, plus the solid insulation between. Warm and frothy water from the filtration spinner was spitting fitfully through the opening.
Voley suddenly realised she was awfully exposed up there on the cylinder. She began to climb downwards, carefully, making sure she didn't lose her grip on the wet rungs. She might not have been worried about heights, but slamming into the deck from twenty metres wouldn't have done her any good at all.
When she got within a metre of the bottom she hopped off, ready to tell the others what she had seen. Driven by such tiny lungs, her voice wasn't loud and she was hoping they'd be able to hear her, as she wasn't sure what kind of signs she could use to tell them that someone had punched a spike through the cylinder cap.
There was no one at the base of the filter.
Voley stood where she was for a few seconds, trying to listen over the roar of the system, looking about for any evidence of her friends. After a time she called out, but there was no answer. Perhaps they hadn't heard her. Or maybe they had gone to some other readout, expecting her to be longer up the ladder.
If the shift was operating under normal circumstances, Lox would finish with filter C-3 and start tracing the pipes back to the boiler. The plan today had been to go back towards the prow after the C-line, and start on the D-filters in turn. Voley decided to go to cylinder D-1, closest to the bow pump. The others would be there, waiting for her.
She began trotting down the line of filters, peering around each one before she ran across the gap. She got all the way back to D-1 without seeing a soul.
By this time, Voley's heart was bouncing in her chest, and not from the heat. She resolved to head back to the boiler, and if they weren't there she would go back up the stairway and get help.
There was no one at the boiler, either.
Voley sprinted for the bottom of the ladder just behind the boiler and its bulky power units. She was most of the way along the port side when she ran through something slippery. Her boots went out from under her and she fell.
The boiler often leaked. Voley got up, cursing her own clumsiness, and then saw that her hands had blood on them. She must have come down harder than she thought.
There was blood on the floor, too. She walked back to where she had fallen and realised that she had slipped in a wide, crimson pool, collecting near the boiler's massive base.
The blood on her hands was not her own.
There was movement above her. She looked up, and saw something sticking out over the edge of the boiler. It was a long, thin arm, emerging from the sleeve of a maintenance worker's coveralls. There was most of a hand at the end of it.
Below the arm, blood was pouring down the side of the boiler, smoking from the heat within.
Voley gave an involuntary cry of pure horror. And as she did so, a face appeared at the edge of the boiler, near Lox's ruined hand, and peered down at her.
That was when Voley began screaming. It was a very long time before she stopped.
"Remind me of the penalty for assaulting a Judge," groaned Vix, wiping her mouth. The Bane woman had hit her in the guts so hard she'd thrown up.
"Code two, section one," Dredd replied. "Ten years. And you shouldn't need reminding, Judge Vix. Your ignorance of the Law will go on record to Judge Buell."
"Oh, give it a rest," Bane groaned wearily. "We're outside the territorial margin." Her face was badly bruised from where Dredd had backhanded her, and she was nursing any number of other contusions. They all were
.
Dredd had seen the second half of the booby trap - the bundle of bolts pushed off the top of the hab stack - and had blasted it with Hi-Ex before it was halfway to the deck. That had separated the solid, lethal bundle into about four thousand separate components, but it hadn't altered their downward velocity. A hard rain had fallen on Mirabelle, and they had all been caught in the storm.
Bane was sitting with her back to the wall, near the access tunnel, and Judge Peyton was spraying the side of her face with something from a small surgical kit. Dredd stood over her. "You could have yelled."
"You could have been squished by a girder."
Peyton stopped spraying and Bane stood up a little shakily. The spray would have taken most of the pain away, but she wouldn't be able to see out of that eye for a while.
"Maybe. But you wouldn't have broken the Law."
Bane waved him away and walked back through the tunnel. The team had retreated there after the attack, safe from any more falling debris. Dredd let her go.
"We oughta get in there and bust the whole block," Larson was snarling. His uniform was cut in several places from the bolts and the skin beneath was lividly bruised. "They tried to wipe us out."
"They were trying to protect themselves," Bane told him. "They thought the Warchild was trying to break through. They have children in those habs, you know. Old people. What else could they do?"
"They should be letting us deal with it," said Larson. "Not dropping half a scrap heap on our heads."
Dredd was about to tell the pair of them to can the chatter when he heard footsteps pounding along the walkway from Castiglione. He pulled Bane to one side. Impetuous or not, the woman was valuable here. "Got company!"
Seconds later a skipper's man skidded to a halt just inside the tunnel and came face to face with the muzzles of five Lawgivers. Yelping in shock, he froze.
Dredd stepped forwards, the muzzle of his Lawgiver centred unerringly on the man's forehead. "What's the hurry, citizen?"
The man swallowed hard. "Judge Dredd?"
"What do you think?"
"Sir, I have a message for you from Deputy Jennig. He says there's been another attack."
It had taken Bane less than fifteen minutes to get Dredd and his team to the site of the attack. According to the shift supervisors on the upper deck of the Royale Bisley, D-shift had been observed no longer than ten minutes before the alarm was raised.
The Warchild was no more then twenty-five minutes away. Maybe less.
Dredd's first action had been to spread his team out, leaving Hellermann with the skipper's men while he searched the area. It didn't take him long to realise that the Warchild was no longer in the immediate vicinity, at which point he had sent Peyton up to check the bodies. Then he had taken Bane to see the survivor.
The woman was an obvious mutant, little more than a metre tall and with a long, naked tail poking out from under her orange work coat. Dredd had let Bane do the talking, but even her kinship with the mutant proved useless. The mouse-like woman was terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought. A doctor brought by the skipper's men had been forced to sedate her just to stop her shrieking.
Eventually Dredd gave up and pulled Bane aside. "We're wasting time. She's no use to us."
Bane nodded agreement. "Maybe later. Right now she needs to rest."
"Not my concern." Dredd stalked away. They were close to the Warchild; he could feel it. But there was a piece missing from the puzzle. He needed more information. For a moment he thought about retrieving Hellermann and grilling her, but the woman was too good a liar. He wanted to be sure about what he was hearing.
He went to the boiler, a massive cube of welded metal in the centre of the deck. The noise of the pumps was greater here and he was glad he could talk to the other Judges via helmet comms. "Peyton?"
The Tek-Judge was halfway down the ladder when Dredd arrived. "Here, sir." He jumped down the last few rungs. "Three bodies," he reported. "Two received fatal wounds from an edged weapon, one from toxin darts. Looks like the Warchild killed them on the deck then dragged them up out of sight." He lifted his helmet briefly to wipe his face with his hand. "Sorry, sir. I'll request more time in the Sector House gym when we get back."
"See that you do. Anything else?"
"No sign of, ah, ingestion. It must have eaten its fill back in the vent."
Dredd nodded. "What's its next move, Judge Peyton? Speculate."
Peyton appeared surprised. He must have known what Dredd usually thought of speculative thinking while on a case. Still, these were hardly usual times.
"You must understand, sir, I was only on the sequencing team. All the downloads, the important neural stuff, that was Dr Hellermann's field. She designed its brain." Peyton took a deep breath. "But from what I know, I don't think it's following the default program."
"Explain."
Peyton gave a little nod as though he were getting things straight in his mind before he said them. "Okay," he began. "The Warchild is built to follow certain mission profiles; I'm not sure how many, but I think it's about fifteen. Stuff like all-out combat, single-target assassination, terror tactics, that kind of thing. Those programs are all hardwired into its brain before it comes out of the tank. If it doesn't get a mission program, it will follow a default program and then go dormant until it gets one. That's what Dr Hellermann was talking about in the council chamber." He spread his hands. "Sir, you should really be asking her about this."
"I would if I trusted her further than I could throw a Lawmaster," Dredd growled. "What's your best guess?"
"I think the Warchild units were programmed before they left Mega-City One. I think whoever bought them wanted them to perform in a certain way in a hurry, and the Warchild here is following that program. Otherwise it would have gone to ground."
"So it thinks it's in a war zone." Dredd rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "That's why we've got survivors - creep's mission is more important than not leaving witnesses."
"Judge Dredd!"
That was Adams, over the comm. "What have you got, Adams?"
"A lead, sir!"
Adams's lead was a scrap of human tissue that Peyton identified as part of a finger. It was lying near one of a row of service panels, where it had snagged on a sharp edge of metal. The service panels were all intact, not ripped open like the vent or the panel in the harbour barge, but when Dredd began tugging at those nearest the finger fragment one of them came away without effort.
Peyton inspected the other side of it while Dredd leaned carefully into the space behind the panel, Lawgiver ready and throwing out a steady cone of light from its clip-on flash. "Well?"
"The locks have been severed," said Peyton. "It pulled one corner open, used an integral blade to cut the locks then straightened the panel out and put it back. Stomm, do you know what that means?"
"Creep's getting smart," Dredd muttered. "Get the civvies. We're going hunting."
The team followed the same formation as in the vent: Dredd and Bane in front, Adams and Larson bringing up the rear. Vix kept an eye on Hellermann who, along with Peyton, was in the centre of the group for protection.
The machinery behind the service panel had been ripped away and a hole was torn in the wall behind it. The Warchild had escaped into the space between the inner and outer hulls of the Royale Bisley.
It was a strange place; an echoing plasteen corridor only a couple of metres wide but dozens high. Girders crossed it at every level, strewn with pipe work and cables, and walkways had been set into the hull material at irregular intervals. The entire space stank of rust - oil and ancient metal.
There were places where the Black Atlantic had obviously eaten clear through the outer hull, and the plasteen had been patched on the outside with welded metal.
The constant racket of the filtration plant was muted here, but there was another noise that Dredd had trouble identifying for a moment. It was a rushing, thrumming sound, rising and falling and creating weird echoes that boom
ed and rattled between the hulls. Dredd had to listen for several seconds before he realised that the noise was that of the sea, moving past him just a few millimetres of plasteen away.
He tapped Bane on the shoulder. "You've got some pretty fancy mutant senses there, captain."
"Er, thanks. I think."
"Just keep 'em sharp. This is a great place for an ambush."
They moved on, heading towards the bow. "It'll open up, not far from here," Bane told him. "The power chambers are on either side of the boiler and the hull space connects directly to them. There should be a hatch."
Dredd nodded. "Let me know if you see it."
As he spoke, something scuttled past his head.
He snapped a hand out and brought it back with the scuttling thing clamped between finger and thumb. It was a pale, fleshy spider, with a body that seemed to consist entirely of one spherical eye. Dredd turned it over, his lip wrinkling in disgust.
The spider reminded him of something but he couldn't tell what. "Anyone else seen anything like this?"
There was a chorus of negatives. "Just some kind of mutant bug," said Larson. "Place is probably crawling with 'em."
Dredd showed the thing to Bane. "These common around here?"
She shook her head. "I've not seen one before," she said levelly. "But like Judge Larson says, we mutants live in such filthy conditions it's a wonder we're not knee deep in them."
The spider's eye was rotating wildly, looking at everything. Dredd squeezed his thumb and forefinger together until the creature burst wetly and died. He was wasting time. "We need that hatch, Bane."
"It's just up here." She ran forwards and stopped next to a doorway on the inner wall. Dredd hadn't seen it, even with the clip-on flashlight. The mutant's night vision must have been phenomenally good.
Dredd's wasn't bad. Better since he'd been given his new eyes.
Bane was smart enough not to try opening the door. Dredd got on one side of it and Vix took up position on the other. Dredd counted down from three on his fingers and then put his boot to the door. It crashed inwards, pieces of lock skating away across the deck.
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