Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  Dredd decided that he would be watching Judge Peyton very carefully from now on.

  Bane thought the best place to go and regroup was the central bridge. The skipper would be there, and he would know whatever there was to know about the Kraken's outlets.

  They began to make their way back across the decks. Bane took them on a different route this time, further towards the stern. It wasn't the quickest way, but it was easier, since the height of the above deck structures lessened towards the cityship's edges. With her torso strapped up tightly by Peyton's compression bandages, Vix could walk, but not climb.

  The SJS-Judge had asked Dredd to leave her and go on ahead, but he refused. "I don't want this team broken up any further. You're still capable of watching our backs, Vix."

  They were about halfway there, moving down a long ramp between two rows of storage drums, when Bane stopped them. "Dredd, do you hear something?"

  He listened hard. There was the sound of the sea, the rushing slap of waves against multiple hulls, but he'd become so used to that he almost didn't hear it any more. Behind him, at the stern, the core drives and other engines were still churning the ocean into froth. But there was something else, borne towards him on the dawn breeze from somewhere ahead. A familiar murmuring, shot through with higher cries and shouts of rage and fear.

  Things breaking.

  "Drokk! Citizen riot!"

  "Here?" Peyton moved out from under Vix's arm - he'd been supporting her every now and then - and moved up level with Dredd. "Grud, I hear it too. What's going on?"

  "Only one way to find out." He turned to the others. "Get to the bridge. I'll meet you there when I've suppressed this."

  "Suppressed? Dredd, you're insane!" Bane was looking at him incredulously. "What about the Warchild?"

  "Could be a direct result, especially if it's gotten into a hab deck." He put a hand up, stopping her protests. "No arguments. Get to the bridge and find out about the Kraken anyway. I could be wrong." With that, he turned and sprinted down the ramp.

  The sound was coming from two or three ships ahead. Dredd was becoming used to the layout of Sargasso now, in as much as the place had a layout. Most of it hadn't been planned so much as evolved, as though structures had been dropped randomly from a great height and then bolted to the deck where they hit.

  He skirted around a pyramid of containers and headed across a rigid walkway to the next hull. The sound of the riot was much louder, now. Unmistakable. Pity he couldn't rely on Weather Control to quell it with a few well-aimed downpours, like he had at the Displaced Persons Habplex. No Lawmaster, either.

  Ahead of him, a cordon of skipper's men had formed around the blocky superstructure of a bulk hauler. People were packing the balconies of the structure, crowding at the portholes, yelling and raging. Chunks of debris were being ripped away from the vessel and hurled down at the skipper's men on the deck.

  Dredd could see groups of Sargassans sitting on the deck, apparently under guard. He ran up to the nearest skipper's man. "What's happening here?"

  The man glanced around and almost recoiled in shock. "Judge Dredd!"

  "Right first time."

  "Ah, minor disturbance, sir. Nothing to be concerned about." As he spoke, a porthole in the hauler's upper structure shattered, vomiting shards of glass. Someone inside had put a prybar through it. Seconds later a bottle fizzed out of the broken port, trailing flame and shattering into a wide puddle of fire when it struck the deck. There was cheering from the balconies.

  This was getting out of hand. "Minor disturbance? Sounds like somebody wants out."

  The skipper's man turned to glare at Dredd. "Sir! This doesn't concern you. Go about your business!"

  Two more bottles whirled trails of fire through the air. One bounced harmlessly across the deck, but the other hit a railing on the way down and exploded, showering the deck with flames. Several of the skipper's men fell back, howling, batting at their clothes where the burning liquid had struck them. A few droplets came down on Dredd's shoulder eagle.

  He watched them fizzle out. "It concerns me now," he grated, and raised the Lawgiver. "Ricochet."

  He aimed high and put the bullet through the broken porthole. The wasplike keening of the ricochet slug was drowned by a sudden chorus of screams as the bullet bounced wildly around the confined space. With its hard, rubberised tip, the ricochet slug was less likely to kill than an execution round, as it didn't spread out upon impact. It just barrelled on through and went on to hit someone else. But it was capable of taking a large number of perps out of action, very quickly indeed.

  Dredd followed the bullet in, putting his boot into the hatchway so hard that the man crouching behind it was knocked senseless. Dredd could hear skipper's men yelling at him from outside, but he ignored them. Like any riot, this needed putting down fast and hard.

  He dropped his helmet mike, setting the amplifier to maximum volume. "Attention citizens!" he roared, his voice hammering around the inside of the superstructure like thunder. "This ship is under arrest!"

  He was in a short corridor at the port side of the structure, leading to a hatch forward and set of stairs aft. Dredd made for the stairs, going up two at a time. The skipper's men could handle anyone trying to get through the hatch. The stairs opened out into a wide room, possibly the ship's bridge. Bottles of raw, reeking fuel were lined up against one wall. Two men had been filling them from a small plastic drum, using a funnel. As Dredd burst in they looked up and one reached for the knife at his belt.

  Dredd put a stun shot into the first man, letting the residual power of the energy burst take the second down too. They rolled to the deck, twitching feebly. Dredd would have put an execution round through them in a second, but he hadn't wanted to set the fuel alight. The wrong bullet in the wrong place here could turn the structure into an inferno.

  There was one more stairway. The bottles had been thrown from the level above. Dredd took these stairs more carefully but he needn't have worried. When he got to the top he saw that the ricochet slug had done his work for him.

  One man was sprawled on the deck, a prybar in one hand and his left eye a bloody mess. The slug had gone in there and out of the back of his head. A woman was slumped in the corner with a shoulder wound and one more man was cowering against the far wall. Dredd wondered why, seeing no wounds on him, but then realised that the slug had gone through the bottle he had been holding. The man was soaked in raw fuel.

  Dredd walked towards him. "Code thirteen, section two. Rioting: five years. Code seven, section two. Setting fires with intent to damage property: thirty years. I don't know what you people have instead of iso-cubes, citizen, but you're going to be spending a long time in them."

  The man sank to his knees. "Dredd, please-"

  "No appeals, creep. I've heard it all."

  "I'm not making an appeal." The man wiped fuel from his face with one hand. "I'll go to the brig if that's what it takes. But please, tell them to let our people out."

  Dredd frowned. "From where?"

  "From this ship!" He pointed downwards. "We live here - the Pride of Macao. Some people aboard are sick, and the skipper's men have sealed us in. They're trying to shut down the ventilation system!"

  The man's name was Viddington. After making sure his female accomplice wasn't going to bleed out, Dredd followed Viddington down through the superstructure and into the Pride of Macao.

  It looked a lot like the inside of the Mirabelle, with stacks of cargo container habs filling a large internal space. The Macao was smaller, but it still housed a lot of people.

  A lot of them were sick. From what Dredd could see, many were dying.

  He was shown children, listless and semi-conscious, wracked with shivers, their dead white skin covered in tiny red sores. It wasn't just children, either; there were eldsters in the habs with the same symptoms, and younger adults, too. The whole ship seemed to be silent except for the ragged breathing and sobbing of the afflicted.

  "There haven't been
skipper's men down here in days," Viddington told him. "Some of the sick have been taken away, but they won't tell us where. People started saying they were being thrown over the side."

  "Is that why you rioted?"

  Viddington hung his head. "It didn't start out like that. We wanted to send a delegation to the skipper, to voice our concerns and get help for our people. But the deputies wouldn't let us out. They said Pride of Macao was under quarantine and we weren't allowed to leave." His voice turned abruptly hard. "Then we found someone trying to shut down the vents."

  Dredd remembered the groups of Sargassans under guard on the deck. Could they have been responsible? But if the citizens of one ship were turning against those of another...

  Sargasso could be on the verge of tearing itself apart.

  "I'm going back on deck, Viddington. Hand yourself over to the skipper's men for sentencing under your laws. Maybe they'll be more lenient with you than me."

  "I doubt that," Viddington sighed. "But will you help us?"

  "I'm on my way to see Skipper Quint right now," Dredd told him. "He's got some explaining to do."

  The Old Man was on the move.

  Years had passed since he had last set foot out of his chambers. It had been a way of life he had come to enjoy, the lack of change. He liked the feeling of permanence and the knowledge that tomorrow, if it brought anything at all, would bring just what today had done. He had seen far too much change in his life, and very little of it had been for the better.

  Besides, it helped him block out the screams.

  Over the past few hours he had come to realise that changes happened anyway, whether a man cocooned himself away in a decommissioned pleasure skimmer or not. He also knew that it wasn't escape he had been trying to find. It was atonement.

  All these years - wandering through the Cursed Earth, finding his way to the Sargasso, setting up home in the skimmer he had owned before the deaths - it had been one long pilgrimage. He had dispensed his drunken wisdom, blearily telling simple sea folk about the things he saw in his head, and their thanks had been a kind of forgiveness.

  But not enough. People had died because of him. A lot of people. He had paid for it, but he could never stop paying.

  It was hard to find peace with dead people constantly screaming in your head.

  But now Judge Dredd was aboard the Sargasso. The circle was completing itself and maybe that would afford the Old Man an opportunity to find the peace he craved.

  The Warchild was still in the cityship. He knew that it had been damaged, although he had no idea how. All he felt were the changes in the patterns it made, the subtle ripples and vibrations in the background medium of thought and life. The Warchild moved through the medium like a shark's fin through black water; utterly without mind but filled with driving intent. It was a weapon - a simple weapon, like a bullet or an arrow. It had been fired and forgotten. While those who had launched it looked away, the weapon would find its target.

  Now the weapon had sustained damage and the ripples it made were ragged and chaotic. Somewhere, the Warchild was hiding, setting all its energies to making itself the way it was before.

  If the Old Man knew anything at all, it was that Judge Dredd must have had something to do with the Warchild's wounding.

  He had never thought to see the lawman again, not after all this time. Now that seemed unavoidable. His own patterns, those of Dredd, those of the Warchild and Bane and so many others, they were all merging, rippling across each other like still water in rain.

  It was quite possible, the Old Man knew, that Dredd could still fail in his task. The Warchild could kill them all. If the full might of the Law wasn't enough to stop it, maybe something else was.

  Him.

  15. ABRAXIS

  When Dredd got to the central bridge, Mako Quint was waiting for him. And he was spitting mad.

  "Dredd," he bellowed. "What in grud's name did you think you were doing?"

  "Putting down a riot," Dredd replied. "Stopping your men from being incinerated. Quint, what's going on down there?"

  Quint turned away, obviously trying to keep a lid on his anger. Dredd noticed the rest of the bridge operatives studiously keeping their heads down. Bane and Vix were sitting over at the far wall.

  "More than you know," Quint grated.

  "Care to fill me in?"

  "This isn't your concern, Dredd."

  Dredd snorted. "Second time I've been told that today. From what I can see, I'd say it was everyone's concern. Your city's diseased, Quint."

  "I know that." The skipper hadn't moved. He was still gazing out of the long front windows, over the city. The towers and gantries of Sargasso were beginning to gleam in the rising dawn. "There's an outbreak on the Pride of Macao. You know, you were there. We are doing everything we can to contain it."

  "Somebody thinks you're not doing enough. Your men have arrested some citizens for trying to shut down Macao's vent system."

  Bane leapt to her feet. "What?"

  "Is that why they went on the rampage?" asked Quint. Dredd shook his head.

  "They rioted because some of them tried to see you and your men wouldn't let them off the ship. Because their sick relatives are being taken away to grud knows where. And yeah, because someone - and they think it was you - was trying to close off their air supply."

  "Is that what they told you?" Quint looked over his shoulder at Dredd. "The sick have been taken to the Venturer - it used to be a pleasure liner and it still has plenty of facilities. We've converted it into a hospital for now."

  "There are still sick on the Macao."

  "I know," said Quint, very quietly. "The Venturer's full."

  Bane gave a shocked gasp and stepped back, covering her mouth.

  "As for the ventilation incident," Quint went on, "some hot-heads from the Elektra Maru tried to do that. Elektra's sternwards of the Macao and they've already voiced concerns about germs being blown back into their ship."

  "Are their concerns genuine?" asked Vix. Her voice was still weak, but she seemed alert.

  Bane shook her head. "I shouldn't think so. Black Atlantic air is pretty lethal to germs because of all the toxins in the water."

  "Try telling that to a ship full of frightened citizens," muttered Dredd. He knew all too well how irrational fears, let loose among a close-packed community, could spiral out of control.

  The plain fact of the matter was that in any given population, most people simply weren't very bright. It was one of the prime reasons that the Mega-Cities had given up on the idea of democracy decades ago; important decisions should be made by people smart enough to make them, Dredd had always believed. Leaving things to the citizens was a charter for catastrophe. They simply weren't bright enough to make the right choices.

  It was also a truism that the more people there were in any given area, the stupider they seemed to get. On a cityship, with a million people packed onto cargo containers and set drifting off across a poisonous ocean, they could be very stupid indeed.

  And stupid people could be dangerous.

  "Dredd!" Vix called. She was getting up, leaning heavily on the back of her seat. "There's something else. Peyton's gone."

  Bane gnawed her lip. "Once he heard about the disease, he said that there was something he needed to do. He left about ten minutes ago."

  As soon as Judge Bryan Peyton heard about the disease outbreak, a nasty suspicion had entered his mind. He hoped he was wrong; after all, cityships had suffered plagues in the past. Sargasso itself had been the site of an outbreak of Spike Fever just nine years before.

  But it was something that he had to check out and it couldn't wait. Dredd might have taken some time at the citizen riot, so Peyton had taken his own initiative and ventured out into the cityship alone.

  He was, he thought as he sprinted across the deck, going to suffer one of two possible outcomes from his action. One: the Warchild would find him and kill him. Or, two: Judge Dredd would find him and kill him.

&nbs
p; Peyton regarded both outcomes as equally likely. After all, in the vids the chubby guy always went off on his own and got eaten by the monster. As for disobeying Dredd's direct orders and leaving the team, well...

  He'd sooner face the Warchild.

  But it felt good to be away from Judge Vix, if nothing else. The woman was as nasty and spiteful as any Judge he'd met. That must have been a prerequisite for SJS personnel, but she really took it to extremes. Peyton wondered if the injury she had suffered was likely to mellow her at all while she was forced to stand down and recuperate. On reflection, he doubted it.

  He got three-quarters of the way to the Royale Bisley before he had to stop. His lungs felt as though they were being sandblasted from the inside, and there was a stitch above his left hip that felt like someone had put the boot in. Tek Division Judges rarely went out on field missions and Peyton had fully expected to spend his entire career in a lab. While the Justice Department provided full fitness training for all its personnel, no matter how sedentary, Peyton had always been able to find other things to do.

  "Not any more," he gasped out loud, holding his side and bending forwards to ease the pain. In the unlikely event that he should survive this mission, he swore he'd be in the gym every shift-end, and would only eat synthi-salad for lunch. If he never set foot outside the lab again, he'd be the buffest Tek-Judge there.

  He reached the Bisley at a slow trot. There was heavy security around its superstructure and had been ever since the Warchild had attacked D-shift. Peyton waved to the skipper's men guarding the place and they let him in without a word.

  Once inside, he went straight along to see the shift foreman, a reptilian-looking mutant called Teague. He'd interviewed Teague when the dead shift-workers had first been found, and although the man hadn't been able to tell him much, he'd been pleasant and helpful.