"There had to be one word for all of them. She got us to bring her out here on the pretext of a unique word, but there had to be a master key. Drokk!"
Vix sighed. "My guess is she was going to bring the Warchild down, then escape into Sargasso. Maybe even claim asylum."
"But it got away from her." Dredd turned and began to walk back to the power chamber. Vix followed him.
"Keep this to yourself," he told her. "Maybe Peyton's bad, and maybe he isn't. But right now, he's the best chance we've got."
When they reached the power chamber, Bane was draping a piece of tarpaulin over Hellermann's body. She'd already used a smaller piece to cover what lay in the chamber.
Peyton was waiting for them, his helmet off and dangling from his belt. "I found this," he said simply, and held out his hand.
One of the spider-like creatures lay there, half its legs smashed. It twitched and pulsed feebly. "There was another one, but I've already dissected that."
"People are dying here, Peyton," Vix hissed. "And you waste your time cutting up bugs?"
"Bugs," he replied, "is right in more ways than one. Look." He had a scalpel in his other hand, and he used this to lift and prod one of the spider's shattered limbs.
Dredd saw metal gleam among the ruins. "Wires?"
Peyton nodded. "Connected to a kind of organic transmitter behind the eye. The Warchild's remote sensors."
"Surveillance devices?" Vix leaned in closer. Trust the SJS to be fascinated by anything to do with spying. "What's the range?"
"A hundred metres, I'd guess."
Dredd lifted the spider out of Peyton's gloved palm and dangled it by one leg. "So if we see one of these things giving us the eye, that means the Warchild won't be far away." He dropped the creature and trod on it, felt it burst messily under his sole. "Good work, Peyton. Anything else?"
"Just speculation."
Vix folded her arms. "Spit it out."
"The Warchild's getting smarter. You said it yourself, Judge Dredd. It's covering its tracks, setting traps for us. Acting more like an enemy agent than a predatory animal."
"You think it got smart enough to ignore Hellermann's word?" Dredd saw the answer in Peyton's eyes.
"Grud," he snarled, turning away. "It's gone rogue."
As soon as Philo Jennig had finished his call to Quint, he had gathered a patrol of skipper's men and headed for the Royale Bisley.
He knew how serious a problem with the water supply could be, just as well as anyone. Sargasso relied on the four filtration ships like he relied on the four chambers of his heart. Out here, on the open ocean, there was simply no other source of water. A man can live for a fortnight without food, but without water he'd be dead inside two days.
If he tried to drink Black Atlantic seawater, make that two minutes.
Jennig had seen a cityship burning, once. It was on fire from bow to stern, so hot that the air above it caught alight and the pollution in the sea below solidified, turning to ragged strips of plastic that floated there to this day. The city had been small, with only a hundred thousand people aboard. But every single one of them had died.
The fires had started during a water riot. The city had only one filtration ship, and that had failed when a slick-eel had been dragged into one of the pumps. The way Jennig heard it, no one checked the grilles over the inlets.
Bits of the eel had gone into the boiler, contaminating the water supply. The cityship had run out of drinkable water before anyone could reach it and the population had torn it apart.
Sargasso was ten times as big. A riot could spread ten times as fast.
Jennig had been on the Camberley when he had made the call, using the telephone on its bridge. Once he had his patrol, he had taken them across Camberley's deck and into the Pride of Macao, a residential vessel three ships starboard of the Mirabelle. It was during the journey through the Macao's hab-stacks that he saw the first sick people.
Someone had recognised him as he led the patrol through the vessel's main street and begged him to help his children. Jennig, who had kids of his own, found it hard to refuse; besides, the man's hab wasn't far out of his way.
The man told him that the children had fallen ill very quickly, in less than an hour. Jennig peered into the hab doorway, saw the state of the sick kids, and backed out fast, promising to call a doctor as soon as he reached a phone point.
By the time Jennig was out of the Macao, he had seen nearly forty people with the same affliction. As soon as he was off the ship he found a phone point, connected his personal handset and called Quint.
"Philo, that was fast. You at the Bisley already?"
"Not yet. Skipper? I think we've got another problem." And, making sure that none of the skipper's men in his patrol could hear him, he told Quint what he had seen.
There was a plague on the Pride of Macao.
13. THE CORE DRIVE
When the telephone rang next, the voice on the other end of the line was not that of Philo Jennig. "Quint, this is Dredd."
The skipper's eyebrows went up into his hairline. "Dredd? How did you-"
"Trust me, Quint. It's not difficult."
Quint cursed silently. The phone points were for the exclusive use of the skipper and his men, not these gun-happy intruders from the Mega-City. He would have to increase security around them, or maybe invest in some kind of line encryption.
If Dredd could patch in to his office, anyone could. He'd never get a moment's peace. "The council's already given you all the help you're getting, Dredd. What do you want?"
"Two things. First off, I need your people to collect the bodies of Judge Adams and Dr Elize Hellermann. They're in the Royale Bisley starboard hull-space and portside power chamber respectively."
"Grud," Quint groaned, putting a hand to his head. "You lost Hellermann?"
"Let's say she lost herself. Secondly, I want you to put the word out for me. There's a new kind of bug loose on your city."
Quint almost spoke, then snapped his mouth closed. Did Dredd know about the disease? And if he did, just how far and how fast had the news spread?
He decided to play it cool and try to find out more. "What do you mean?"
"It looks like a white spider," Dredd replied. Quint let out a silent sigh of relief. "As big as your hand - okay, my hand. Body's just a big eye. They're the Warchild's pets, and if your men see any of these things around it means the creep's close by."
"Okay, Dredd, I'll spread the word. Anyone sees big bugs, we'll let you know."
He put the phone down. Let Dredd chase his pet monster. Right now, Mako Quint had other things on his mind.
Down among the hab-stacks of the Pride of Macao, the plague was racing out of control.
Bane had recovered a lot of her composure by the time Dredd had returned with the skull-headed Judge. She hadn't wanted to lose control in front of everyone like that, but the sight of Hellermann's carcass, sliced open so bloodily, had been one horror too much.
Orca had died like that. She wondered if he'd tried to crawl away, too.
The remaining team was heading up out of the filtration plant, using the long maintenance stairway. The respite from the plant's noise was welcome, but it's heat increased as they climbed higher and the stairway seemed terrifyingly narrow and flimsy. If she looked down, she could see the deck through the open mesh, tens of metres below her boots. She did that once, and after that made sure she didn't look down again.
It was a relief to get out of the wet, yammering heat of the plant and onto a solid deck. Bane led them through the distribution section, where bottles were filled with water pumped up from the final filters, and shipped out in their thousands to this quarter of the cityship. Once past that, they were in the open air again.
The storm seemed to have eased down since they were last on the cityship's upper surface. They were also shielded by some of the bigger structures - the Bisley was closer to the centre of Sargasso, and more habs and towers had been built around it. Bane took th
em into a street between two vast racks of storage drums. The drums had once held oil and noxious chemicals but now they were bolted together amidst great sheets of gantry and kilometres of support cable. Ladders were welded to every stack and windows sawn out of each circular end. The drums were big enough for one person to sleep in if they weren't too tall and slept curled up.
"Cheapest kind of housing," she told Dredd.
He seemed unsurprised. "Stackers," he said. "Got the same thing back in the Meg."
"Why are we here, Bane?" Vix asked, her voice as sneering and acidic as ever. "Maybe you need a place for the night, but personally I wasn't intending to stay that long."
Bane gave her the sour eye. "Keep your skull on. This is just the best place to get to anywhere else. Like an intersection."
"And what do we do now?"
"Well," Bane said carefully, cocking her head to the side. "Either we can run around all over the cityship like idiots, or we can wait."
They waited.
The Judges used the time to check and reload their Lawgivers, running checks on the voice-select systems and making sure the magazines were full, with spares in easy reach. Bane just paced.
She guessed that they probably wouldn't have to stand around in the drum stacks for very long. Once the word went out on Sargasso it tended to spread at an exponential rate. Every Sargassan was part of the communication chain - everyone would simply pass a message along to anyone they met, and even with most people hiding in their habs, terrified of being disembowelled by a rampaging killer, there would still be enough links in the chain to get the word from one end of Sargasso to the other in minutes.
She wondered if it was like that back in Dredd's city. No, she thought, looking at the reinforced knuckles on his gloves and the size of the gun he was reloading. It probably wasn't.
As it turned out, she was right about not waiting for long. Within a few minutes, a skipper's man came to find them.
The man was Loper, one of the more extreme mutants in Quint's employ. His short torso was balanced on a pair of supernaturally long legs, bent backwards at the knee and partially armoured to support their own weight. He looked like a human grasshopper. He was also the fastest man in the cityship, which made him invaluable as a message runner.
Bane knew that as long as Sargasso remained without a proper system of integrated communications, Loper would never be out of work.
The man bounded across the deck towards them, actually stepping over a couple of low-lying habs on his way to the drum stacks. "Judge Dredd," he called out, skidding to a halt and folding himself down to a more human level. When he did, his knees came up to the back of his head.
"Skipper Quint sends his regards," he quoted. "And he says that spiders have been reported in the Kraken."
Dredd threw a glance at Bane. "Know it?"
"Kraken's one of the core drives, back at the stern. Dredd, there's only one way into a core drive. If we can trap it there..."
"Maybe it's thinking the same thing," said Peyton warily.
"Either way, that's where we're headed." Dredd gave Loper a nod of acknowledgement. "Give the skipper our thanks, and tell him to pull everyone back from the Kraken. We'll make a stand there."
"Hop along, now," Vix smirked. Loper raised an eyebrow at her.
"If there's any justice at all," he told her quietly, "you'll end this day knowing what your own guts look like." With that he stretched way up over their heads and stepped away. In a few strides he was out of sight.
Bane gave Vix a look. "You really do have a way with people, skull-head."
Vix shrugged. "If you find any 'people' on board this wreck, do let me know."
Bane put her face very close to the glossy front of Vix's helmet, smiled politely, and blinked at her. All three sets of eyelids. The Judge flinched involuntarily.
"Sure I will, " Bane said cheerily. "If you're still alive."
Bane ran next to Dredd as they belted across the deck towards the stern. "There are six core drives," she was telling him. "They're just floating engines: chem-tankers emptied out and fitted with the propulsion systems from old nuke subs. They give Sargasso most of its power."
"Motive or electrical?"
"Both. Left here." She pointed to the turning they needed to take, between two outlet funnels. "Most of the other ships run their engines on fossil fuels, and we can distil that straight out of seawater."
"Wondered how you kept running."
There was something she needed to make him understand, something she'd only thought of as they had begun running. "Listen, Dredd. Just because the drives are nuclear, doesn't mean they're clean. There's this stuff we call darkwater - mixture of coolant, lube oil, old fuel and concentrated Black Atlantic. The core drives get full of it, and it's not nice."
The lawman might have been big, but he certainly wasn't stupid. He caught on to what she was saying before she said it. "Flammable?"
"Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Look, I'm not saying don't use your guns. Just keep the incendiaries to a minimum, okay?"
Bane hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said Kraken was nothing more than a floating engine. The days when it could have been anything else had ended decades ago, when Sargasso's work crews had sliced off the entire upper deck and stripped the inside of the hull bare. They had left the propulsion screws, but nothing more. Even the engines themselves had gone, lifted out on cranes and broken down for spare parts. In their place was a Sov-built nuclear power plant, the great armoured globe of the fusion core taking up the entire forward end of the ship.
The work crews had left the Kraken a vast, blunt-nosed slab of a vessel, covered in enormous welds. It didn't even have a superstructure any more, save the massive braces that connected it to the rest of the cityship. The core drives were the only vessels in Sargasso that weren't covered in buildings, partly because of their function, but mostly due to the lingering, if irrational, fear of radioactive contamination.
The only raised structure on Kraken's upper surface was a small blockhouse, two-thirds of the way towards the stern. When Bane and the Judges reached it, a wide half-circle of skipper's men were waiting for them, weapons centred on the blockhouse hatch. Spotlights from the nearest vessels had been trained on the Kraken, and in their harsh glare Bane noticed the shattered remnants of several eye-spiders.
"Skipper's men," called Dredd as he strode into the centre of the deck. "Stand down. We'll take it from here."
None of them budged, although at the sound of Dredd's voice a few lowered their weapons on reflex. One of the men gave Dredd a snappy salute. "Sorry, sir, but Skipper Quint's orders are to keep that hatchway covered, even after you've gone in. If it tries to go past you, it'll run into us."
Dredd seemed to mull this over for a second. "Agreed," he said. "But in that case, move your people back a few more metres. This thing's quicker than you can imagine."
With the warnings given, there was no reason for Bane not to open the hatch and go inside. Except that she didn't want to. Suddenly, on this wide open deck with the spotlights and the weapons all aimed at the small of her back, and the Warchild almost certainly waiting for her below and sharpening its knives, Gethsemane Bane found she had some difficulty getting her legs to move. From the neck up she was fine: determined, alert, anxious to find the creature and see it destroyed for what it had done to Orca and Judge Adams and all the others. But the rest of her body was a different matter. Her guts had turned to ice water and her boots were welded to the deck.
"Drokk it!" she growled angrily to herself. "I'm gonna take up fishing."
The hatch swung open as Dredd pushed it inwards. He had the flashlight clipped to his gun again, but there was no need for it as the interior of the blockhouse was as well lit as anywhere on Sargasso. The crews who provided maintenance for nuclear reactors liked a lot of light to work by, and the Kraken had power to spare.
Dredd ducked inside. Bane followed, trying to look everywhere at once. The blockhouse had no floor and the st
eps down into Kraken's belly started right at the hatch. Dredd was already moving down, Lawgiver held near his shoulder with the muzzle vertical, ready to drop down and fire in an instant. Watching him, Bane was struck by the fact that Dredd moved like a cat. He was encumbered by his shoulder armour, a helmet that couldn't have done anything for his field of vision, kneepads, bulky boots and gloves, but he went down the stairs in perfect silence. Not a single part of his uniform even brushed a wall.
Bane, who barely came up to Dredd's chin if she stood on her toes, could only wish for such grace.
The stairs went down for three flights before they reached a walkway. When Bane got to the bottom she moved past Dredd as carefully as she could, in order to spread out and let the others down. The stairs finished in the centre of the vessel, on a circular platform of open mesh. Bane looked down through the gridwork under her boots. Ten metres below her was a metal grille, just covering a long pool of evil-smelling black fluid.
She pointed. "Darkwater," she mouthed. Dredd gave a brief nod.
The interior of the Kraken was mainly one single, huge chamber. To the stern a bulkhead sealed off the drive shafts, and far away towards the bow was another lead-lined bulkhead that protected the work crews from the fusion core. Or possibly the other way around. The remaining space was filled with massive pieces of networked pipes and gantries. Bane saw rows of control boards with walkways between them, huge cylinders of coolant, and pipework everywhere.
A thousand places for the Warchild to hide, especially if it had chameleon skin.
The Kraken made surprisingly little noise, given that it was partially responsible for pushing the impossible bulk of Sargasso across the Black Atlantic. Instead of the deafening hammer of the Bisley's filtration plant, this was more of a constant, almost subsonic drone. If Bane put her teeth together, she could feel them vibrating.
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