Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  He dived inside and came up with his Lawgiver aimed and steady. Vix was right behind him.

  The room was empty. Blue-green biolume light shone off dozens of pipes and ducts, lining the walls from top to bottom in a maze of tubes. There were more pipes on the ceiling, too - it was like standing inside a giant junction box.

  There was another hatch ahead of him, but that one was already open.

  Dredd stalked forwards, his boots silent, his gaze flicking from the view straight in front of him to that through the viewfinder of his Lawgiver. He heard Bane and Hellermann come in behind the Judges.

  There was movement at the hatchway. Another spider appeared around the frame, regarding him steadily with its great, liquid eye. It looked at him for a few seconds then darted away.

  "Dredd," hissed Bane. "Wait."

  "Spit it out, captain."

  "It feels wrong here. I think-"

  Something next to Dredd's left shoulder exploded with a deafening roar.

  The blast threw him into Vix, knocking her off her feet. Dredd just managed to keep his balance, whipping the Lawgiver up around to find the source of the explosion. As he did, his gaze caught the edge of his shoulder pad. The armoured foam had been peppered with shrapnel and there were three pale, bonelike needles sticking out of it.

  "It's a trap!" he roared. Ahead of him, pallid, fleshy pustules were oozing from between the pipes, swelling visibly as he watched.

  "Behind us," called Larson. "They're everywhere!"

  Dredd picked a pustule at the far end of the next chamber and put an execution round through it. It popped messily, vomiting white pus down the wall. "Standard rounds," he yelled, blasting another two. "Take them out before they arm. And watch for needles!"

  The chamber became a flashing, booming nightmare of gunfire and bursting pustules. Dredd took out the nearest, with Vix using her SJS marksmanship training to rid the far chamber of dozens more. A couple had grown too quickly and exploded before she had the chance to shoot them. Poisoned needles whistled through the air, one bouncing off Vix's helmet.

  Behind Dredd, the gunfire was joined by the sound of another explosion. He heard Adams give a choked cry, Peyton yelling that he was hit. "Judge down!" Larson screamed. "Judge down!"

  "Fall back!" bellowed Dredd, hauling Vix up and throwing her bodily back towards the hatch. "Get the wounded outside, now!" Within seconds, all the Judges were out of the chamber. Dredd paused at the opening, grabbed the hatch with his free hand and brought his Lawgiver up. "Incendiary," he grated.

  He had the hatch closed before the incendiary shell hit the furthest wall. There was a familiar thumping impact as it hit, and then the chamber walls were hammering as the inferno set off the remaining pustules. In a few moments, the hull space was silent.

  Except for the sounds of Judge Adams trying to breathe.

  The man was on his back on the walkway, every muscle rigid. Peyton was kneeling next to him, helmet discarded, bleeding from a dozen wounds of his own but completely ignoring them as he busily hunted through his surgical kit for a syringe. Captain Bane had both hands crossed over Adams's straining chest, pushing rhythmically, trying to keep his heart beating.

  Dredd watched Peyton slam a pressure syringe to the fallen Judge's neck, take it away to adjust the dose, and then administer it again. It had no effect. A few seconds later, Adams gave an agonised, rattling groan, and died.

  Bane sat back, her soot-streaked face running with tears. Peyton gave a snarl of fury and took her place, thumping Adams's chest five times, dropping his ear to the man's sternum to listen, then back up and thumping again.

  "Let it go," Dredd said quietly. "He's gone."

  At those words, Peyton sagged back against the hull. "There was too much toxin," he whispered. "He only took one needle, but there was too much..."

  Abruptly, Vix leapt to her feet. "Drokk!" she yelled. "Where's Hellermann?"

  While Dredd had been watching Judge Adams die, Elize Hellermann had escaped.

  As soon as Hellermann had seen the spider, she knew that she was close to the Warchild's base of operations.

  The bug that Dredd had so carelessly crushed was actually a miracle of biotechnology. Grown from spores hidden within the Warchild's body, it matured in hours into a tiny mobile surveillance unit, equipped with an organic radio link between itself and its onetime host. Mineral deposits in the legs formed an antenna array, capable of sending back pictures from the eye over a distance of almost a hundred metres.

  The booby trap bombs were spore-grown, too. Once the Warchild had started eating its victims, she realised that it was planning to mature some of its on board weapons store.

  She was close now. If the Warchild had been watching them, it couldn't have been too far away.

  Hellermann had slipped away as Dredd ordered his retreat. She had seen Adams go down - a needle in his neck - and guessed that they would spend time trying to revive him. Fruitless, of course - the Warchild's toxins were based on those of the most lethal Black Atlantic shellfish. The man's nervous system had been pulp within moments. But it had given her a chance to escape.

  She ran as fast as she dared down the space between the hulls. Ever since Justice Department had taken her project from her, she had frequented far worse places than this. A little grime meant nothing to her if it got her back within range of her creation.

  Hellermann found the service panel where they had come in and squeezed back out onto the maintenance deck of the Bisley. The whole journey into the hull space had been a set-up, including planting the tissue fragment to lure the Judges inside. Thinking about that, Hellermann couldn't suppress a grim smile of satisfaction.

  Constant self-improvement and evolution had been part of the Warchild's design from the beginning. It was, however, far exceeding her expectations.

  Her offspring was doing better than she could possibly have hoped.

  Hellermann paused a few metres from the service panel. The Warchild would have to stay within a hundred metres of the spiders to receive their signals. There wasn't anywhere within that distance it could hide, unless...

  Royale Bisley was only about eighty metres across.

  Hellermann belted across the deck, under the huge pipe that led from the boiler to the desalination filter, and towards the opposite side of the ship. There was a power chamber there, too, just like the one Dredd had just incinerated.

  She wondered how long it would be before the fire shorted out some vital wiring and shut down the whole filtration plant.

  Hellermann reached the power chamber in a few moments and searched until she found the hatch. It looked locked from the outside; even the display panel next to it said that it was. But she had taught her creation better than that. She looked quickly around to make sure she had not been followed and then pushed her way in.

  The Warchild was waiting for her. There must have been spiders watching her approach.

  She saw it for less than a second before it shimmered to near-invisibility, its mimetic skin perfectly matching the wall behind it. But that second was all Hellermann needed. "Götterdämmerung!" she snapped.

  The Warchild froze. As she watched, it bleached back into visibility.

  Hellermann let out a long, relieved breath. She hadn't been entirely sure the code word would still work.

  She had been lying to Dredd all along, of course. Although each Warchild did have its own abort code, there was another code that would shut any one of them down. Dredd himself could have used it. That, however, would not have left Elize Hellermann out of Justice Department's clutches, on neutral territory and with the Warchild completely in her control.

  Once she had demonstrated to the mutant council that she herself had rid them of their problem, she couldn't see any reason why they wouldn't grant her asylum.

  The Warchild remained in front of her, swaying slightly. It skin had faded back to a blank, pale grey, dry and leathery now it had been out of the tank for so long. The creature still looked rough and u
nfinished, but that was an illusion. It had matured perfectly.

  Blades had emerged from each of its forearms, long and lethally sharp. They had hinged forwards, ahead of the slender, three-fingered hands.

  "Well," Hellermann whispered. "Here we are. Together at last."

  The Warchild stayed frozen, arms limp at its sides. Drool glittered below its toothy, lipless mouth. Only its eyes moved, following her as she moved.

  Hellermann smiled at it, warmly. "You need a name," she told it. "After all, you're all grown-up now. Calling you child is... insulting."

  She took a step back to admire her work. "I shall call you Freedom," she said. A movement on the ceiling caught her eye. There was a spider above the Warchild, watching her with its one limpid eye.

  As she watched, another joined it. And another. They stood, upside down, in perfect formation.

  "Wait," she whispered. "They shouldn't be able to do that. Not on their own..."

  There were spiders all over the ceiling now. "But if they aren't acting on their own, that means you must be-"

  The Warchild snapped forward, faster than she could think.

  12. QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS COSTODIES

  On the cityship Sargasso, very little was ever used for its original purpose. It was something you got used to after a while; the fact that everything was made out of something else, or rebuilt to do a different job, or stapled to the deck and used as a family home. When a city's economy was based on fishing and scavenging, in roughly equal measure, recycling became a fact of life.

  The same was true of Mako Quint's office. Correction: the skipper's office. Quint had to remind himself of that on a regular basis. Although he had been re-elected as skipper four times, and had held the post for seven years, he could be stripped of that title at any moment. Then he would have to pack his things and move back to his old hab in the Middleton, while someone else got to sit at the desk and read reports.

  He had been in the office for so long, it was easy to forget that he didn't own it.

  Perhaps the captain of the assault carrier had felt the same way, in the days when the ship was a potent and independent vessel. There was no way he could have known, back when the Atlantic was still partly blue, that one day his ship would form the governmental centre of a mobile city-state with almost a million inhabitants, and that his quarters would house the man whose word, in that state, was law.

  Right now, Mako Quint didn't feel much like the law. He felt less in control of events with every report that dropped onto his desk.

  Shift-workers killed on the Royale Bisley. Hab-dwellers on the Mirabelle setting traps for the Warchild and almost flattening Dredd's entire team. The Old Man had gone missing.

  And now this.

  In addition to being deselected by the council, the position of skipper would also pass on if Quint was dead, or too severely injured to carry on. With everything he was hearing about the progress of Judge Dredd and his team, that possibility seemed more and more likely.

  The telephone jangled abruptly, jarring him out of his morbid thoughts. Time to be the skipper again. He lifted the receiver.

  "Quint."

  "Jennig here, skipper. You wanted me?"

  That hadn't taken long. Quint had put the word out that he needed to speak to his deputy just ten minutes previously. He'd told one messenger, who had then told every skipper's man he could find. Each of the men he told then did the same thing, and before long Jennig knew he had to report in.

  It was an efficient system, and vital since there was no centralised communications system on the Sargasso. Unless you included gossip.

  "That business in the Royale Bisley," he said into the mouthpiece. "Heard it got messy."

  "Wasn't pretty, skipper, no."

  "Philo... Look, I hate to ask this, but did you get everything cleared away? I mean, no, er, body parts missing?"

  "Grud, skipper, what do mean?"

  Quint sighed. "Sorry to ask. But I'm getting reports about the water coming out of the Bisley. People are saying it tastes bad. Just wanted to make sure there wasn't a body in the boiler."

  Jennig made a disgusted sound. "Charming thought. I'll get right on it, have a crew check the tanks. If we can't see anything obvious we might have to shut Bisley down and steam out the whole system."

  "Thanks, Philo. Let me know what you find."

  Quint replaced the handset and sat back. Four separate reports had come in about foul water being pumped out of the Royale Bisley. On a closed system like a cityship, that kind of situation could get out of hand, very badly and very quickly.

  The last thing Mako Quint needed right now was a water riot.

  They found most of Elize Hellermann outside the power chamber. The rest of her, the steaming mass that had spilled from her opened belly after the Warchild's attack, was still inside the hatchway. Hellermann had managed to crawl out of the chamber without it.

  The expression frozen on her face was one of confusion rather than pain.

  Bane gave a whimpered curse and stumbled away at the sight. Dredd let her go. She'd seen more horror on this trip than any civilian out of wartime, and none of the other bodies had been nearly so fresh. Heat from Hellermann's ruined corpse was still in the air, along with the coppery, faecal stench of death. Dredd saw Bane hit the chamber wall with her back and slide down it, her head in her hands, and - mutant or not - couldn't bring himself to despise her for it.

  "Vix, Larson - you're with me. Peyton, see if you can work out what went wrong. Looks like Hellermann's word didn't work. I want to know why."

  As Peyton trotted back to the power chamber, Dredd began to run a sweep of the surrounding area, with Vix and Larson watching his back. He knew in his bones that the Warchild had escaped them again; it never stayed around once it had made a kill. But procedure, not to mention plain common sense, dictated that he had to be sure.

  He also wanted to get Larson and Vix back on track. Larson was taking Adams's death hard, and Vix was beating herself up for not keeping an eye on Hellermann. In normal circumstance Dredd wouldn't have hesitated in hauling Vix over the coals for it, but they were already a Judge down. He needed everyone frosty and aiming true.

  The sweep took five minutes. Dredd had planned to order Vix and Larson back to the chamber and continue alone for a while, get a better feel for the place. But Vix cut in before he could speak.

  "Judge Larson, we've already lost one scientist today. Go back to the chamber and assist Judge Peyton."

  Larson frowned. "Ah, I'm not sure-"

  "You're questioning my orders, Judge?" snapped Vix. "Consider how that would look on your SJS dossier."

  Larson cocked his head slightly towards Dredd, looking for confirmation. Dredd knew that Vix was up to something - SJS Judges always were - but he wanted to know what. He gave Larson the nod and the other Judge walked quickly away.

  When he was gone, Vix sidled closer to Dredd. "This is a disaster."

  Her voice was quiet, despite the noise from the filtration plant. She was using its hammering to mask her words, even while speaking over a private comms channel. Typical SJS procedure.

  "Like to tell me something I don't know, Judge Vix?"

  "Dredd, I'm serious. We're really in the drek now, worse than you can imagine." She glanced over her shoulder. "Your mutant looks like she's lost the plot. With Adams down we're a gun short, and now Hellermann's toast. No way we can bring the Warchild to heel without her."

  "Hate to break this to you, Vix, but Hellermann struck out. We'd have been no better off if she'd stayed." He fixed the SJS Judge with a steely glare. "You can take that back to Buell right now."

  "My report to Judge Buell will be..." She trailed off. Dredd could see that, oddly, she was unsure of herself. Perhaps losing Hellermann had hit her harder than he'd thought.

  "Judge Buell and I don't agree on everything," she said finally.

  "Not what I heard."

  "For grud's sake, Dredd! If you're watching anyone it should be Peyton
!" She spun away from him and stood with her arms folded tightly. She's said too much, Dredd thought. And she knows it.

  He didn't have the time or inclination to do this the slow way. "Judge Vix! If you've got information pertaining to this case, I suggest you give it up. Withholding evidence will get you ten to fifteen!"

  She gave him a wry smile. "If I was afraid of cube time I'd never have joined the SJS." Still, she made that quick, almost unconscious look left and right before she spoke again.

  "I didn't say this, Dredd. But the SJS are investigating McTighe's people. We've got good evidence that Tek Division didn't dispose of all the Warchild units like they were ordered to."

  Dredd shook his head. "Impossible. McTighe's a tinkerer of the worst order, but he's not insane."

  "No, but some of his people might be. Remember, when Project Warchild was broken up, Hellermann's staff were sent all over. Some of them ended up back in Tek-Div." Vix tilted her helmet back towards the power chamber. "Like Peyton. Not too hard to believe one or two might still be devoted to the dream."

  Dream? More like a nightmare. The idea that Tek Division could be corrupted from within, that some of Hellermann's acolytes were still active and trying to bring the Warchild project to fruition was a disturbing one.

  "My job was to keep Hellermann alive until she got a chance to use the word," Vix continued. "And to come back with it. So we could control the Warchild units if there were any still in the Meg."

  "Hellermann said there was one word per Warchild. She had to see it to know which one."

  Vix threw her arms up. "Oh, sure! If she got to read the barcode on the back of its neck!" She strode up to the nearest piece of machinery and kicked it, hard. "We've got the Psi Division reports. That's the only way she could work out which Warchild was which, and you know how fast they move. What was she going to do, offer it a haircut?