"Is 'ah' an SJS term I'm not yet aware of?"
In reply, Vix rolled the chair away and gestured at the eyepiece. Dredd leaned down and peered through it.
Vix had focussed the telescope on the bridge of the Abraxis. The scope was extremely powerful; all Dredd could see of the pirate cityship was a section of front window. There was someone sitting behind the window, looking out, headphones covering his ears. Probably a comms operator of some kind, thought Dredd.
Then he noticed that the man's face was paper white, scattered with dull scarlet rashes. The jaw hung slackly open and the eyes were rolled back, staring up at nothing.
"Everyone," hissed Dredd. "What, everyone's dead?"
"Dead, dying, what's the difference?" Vix sat back in disgust. "There's no one there to attack Sargasso. The place is a floating ghost town."
"No one to alter course, either..." Dredd knew what he had to do. If Sargasso couldn't move out of the way, then Abraxis would have to change course instead. Quint had told Dredd that Sargasso would take twenty hours to make any noticeable course change, but Abraxis was only one-tenth the size and built for speed.
It could work. But he'd need a boat and someone to watch his back.
"Vix. How would you like to stay up here for a while?"
The boat Quint found for him was called Seawasp, and it was the fastest vessel Sargasso had to offer. It looked like a rich man's plaything; little more than a slender, powder-blue polycarbonate hull five metres long, with a needle-sharp prow and a blunt, flared stern housing twin aquajet drives. A shallow windshield angled back towards a single bucket seat and a control board that seemed to consist entirely of throttles.
The whole thing looked flimsy and feathery, as though a good kick in the right place would send it to the bottom.
Bane was there to send him off. She'd taken him down to the harbour where Seawasp bobbed lightly among the scavengers and fishing smacks. "It's only used for observation, normally," she told him. "Scooting around the hulls, making sure everything's okay. Not much good for anything else."
"Will it get me to Abraxis?" Dredd was settling into the bucket seat and testing the controls. "Don't want to get halfway there and run out of juice."
"You've got plenty." She gave the hull a farewell slap. "Just try not to hit anything. The hull would shatter."
"Comforting." He thumbed the start key and heard the drives growl throatily behind him. Quint had already opened one of the harbour doors partway.
With Dredd's gloved hands on the throttles, the Seawasp nosed carefully around the massive door and out into the open sea. The sun was well up now and glinting off the sluggish, oily surface of the Atlantic. Ahead of him, Dredd could see the angular grey bulk of the Abraxis. It looked like a dark island, studded with sensor masts and weapons mounts. Even from this distance he could see that the pirate city had its harbours facing forwards, so that the attack vessels could go straight into action.
Like Sargasso, Abraxis was surrounded by a cloud of spray churned up by its titan engines.
Dredd eased the throttles forward. Seawasp slowly built up speed, nosing easily through the water. Then, quite without warning, the vessel leapt forwards.
Dredd found himself howling through the water at close to Lawmaster speeds. The rich idiot who had designed the vessel must had set a point on the throttle tracks that kicked in some kind of overdrive; no doubt to impress other rich idiots who might be watching. Dredd gripped the twin throttle bars hard, playing one against the other to keep Seawasp on track. Every wave on the ocean made the boat skip violently to one side or the other.
He dropped his helmet mike. "Dredd to Vix."
"I've got you, Dredd. Nice boat."
"Cut the chatter and keep watching, Vix. I'll need your eyes on me all the way." If Dredd's gut feeling about the Abraxis proved right, he'd need eyes in the back of his head for this trip. Vix, sitting up there in the stern lookout with her telescopes aimed right at him, would be those eyes.
He could have taken someone with him - Bane, maybe - but if he was walking into the lion's den he'd rather do it alone. Better to put himself voluntarily under SJS surveillance than to chaperone a civilian around. It was going to be tough enough guarding his own skin.
He pushed the throttles as far forward as they could go and aimed Seawasp at the Abraxis, piloting the little boat by feel as a mountain of grey steel grew beyond the prow.
While Dredd was skimming the black waves towards Abraxis, Judge Peyton was, against all the odds, making progress. Through a series of tests, biopsies and lucky guesses he now had a breakdown of how the disease functioned. He should have done autopsies, he knew, but there was no way he could bring himself to open up a corpse. The biopsies were hard enough. Peyton's training was in DNA resequencing and the largest part of a human being he usually handled was a fragment of genome. His knowledge of medicine was rudimentary, to say the least.
This, he'd decided, had to be the most radical cross-training programme in Justice Department history.
He had made his breakthroughs by ignoring the physiology of the victims, about which he knew very little, and instead concentrating on the spores that caused it. The DNA they contained was quite simple and easy to sequence. It was also encrypted, but since Peyton himself had worked on the encryption algorithms on the Warchild project, he could take that apart as easily as he could strip a Lawgiver.
His first clue had been the way the patients died in waves.
He had seen it with his own eyes. The nurses had been tending a small girl with silvery hair and two forearms emerging from each elbow. He had just taken a blood sample from the girl and been watching the nurses when the girl had suddenly convulsed on the bed and died. There was no hope for her: no heroic battle to keep her organs free from oxygen starvation, no electrical restarting of the heart. She was instantly, utterly dead.
Her nervous system, he later found out, had chemically broken down.
When the nurses had turned to check on the girl's brother and sister who were brought in at the same time, they were dead too.
His second clue was the noise they made when they died. A long, airy groan, as though their tiny lungs were being squeezed empty. He had heard that noise before when Judge Adams had died.
After that, it really hadn't taken him long to chart the processes of the disease. And what he had been able to discover both impressed and appalled him. It seemed that the Warchild plague, as he couldn't help but call it, was the kind of disease that could never have evolved on its own. It was too ordered, to specific to be natural. Only a human being could be so perverse as to create such a thing.
It began with the spores.
Infinitesimal and almost indestructible, the spores remained dormant in the water supply until ingested. The only evidence that a bottle of water contained the spores was a faint, but noticeable, aftertaste, probably caused by a chemical released by the tiny motes as they began to self-activate.
Their catalyst was human saliva. Peyton surmised that any mutant on the ship whose body chemistry was sufficiently modified might escape becoming a disease carrier, since the chemicals sought by the spores were quite specific. But that wasn't the end of the story, not by a long way.
The spores were not in themselves, even dangerous.
However, each one was a tiny factory. Once a spore had encountered the saliva-borne chemical triggers, it would open like a flower, attaching itself to whatever tissue it could find. Many would be washed through the host's system, but a few would lodge. They would then begin producing bacteria.
Once loose in the bloodstream, the bacteria would swarm and multiply at a ferocious rate. The human immune system did not affect them in the slightest - they had been designed very specifically to deal with it. Once in the bloodstream, they caused an allergic reaction, hence the rashes of red dots following infested blood vessels. They were also adept at spreading to new hosts, finding their way into the lungs and moving to new victims through droplet contact. A si
ngle sneeze could release a hundred million of them into the atmosphere.
The bacteria would spread through the victim's bloodstream until it had almost reached saturation point, making it difficult for the host to take up oxygen, and causing listlessness and shivering. Then, after a certain level of bacterial infection had occurred, they simply died. Every bacterium committed cellular suicide in a sudden, catastrophic cascade.
When they died, their last act was to release a tiny amount of toxin, very much like that in the Warchild's poisoned needles. The victim didn't have a chance. In seconds, the myelin sheath surrounding every nerve cell in their bodies would suffer total and complete breakdown.
So Peyton knew how the disease worked. But he still didn't have the faintest idea of how to cure it. The spores were difficult to harm and they would begin releasing their bacterial load after being in the host's system for only a few minutes.
He had to target the bacteria. But if he found a cure, something that killed the bacteria themselves, their deaths would also release the neurotoxin, crippling or killing the host.
"As a wise man once said," he muttered to himself, "you don't dare kill it."
He was still in the office, every microscope in use and the computer humming. He had stopped the growth chamber as he didn't need any more bacteria. Every time he had started to grow some they had multiplied at insane speeds, then broken down into a puddle of lethal poison.
It was getting hot in the office. Peyton turned to set the aircon a little higher, and then stopped. As he had reached for the control the sleeve of his uniform had ridden up a little.
Peyton swallowed hard, then pulled his sleeve up. The arm beneath was white with a scattering of crimson dots.
His deadline had just become a lot tighter.
Dredd took Seawasp around to the starboard side of Abraxis, skimming around the pirate city's perimeter with the throttles wide open the boat heeled over at a massive angle, almost on its side. He had to fight the controls as he went through the enormous wake at the stern - the cityship's huge engines were ripping the water into a frenzy; creating a thundering grey storm of spray and lethal undercurrents.
Vix immediately told him he was out of sight, which was exactly what he didn'e want to hear. He needed the SJS-Judge to be watching him constantly.
After he was out of the other side, he slowed Seawasp down and began to look for a way to board. The harbours, he had noticed on the way in, all had their doors closed. No way in there, and besides, it would make the journey to the bridge longer.
Here, close to the cityship's massive hulls, Seawasp had another advantage over larger vessels. The little vessel could skate right over currents that would drag a scavenger clear under the surface.
He tooled Seawasp around the port side of the city, hunting for a way to get on board. After a minute or two he saw it - a long service ladder stretching down to a tiny, sea level platform. He nosed Seawasp in and triggered the mooring clamps.
Cables hissed from the vessel's starboard flank, each tipped with a magnetic projectile. The clamps slapped onto the pirate city's hull, locking tightly, and then the cable drums in Seawasp's shell began to reel in. In a few seconds, the little craft was securely moored next to the platform.
The hull next to him was a grey cliff of steel, stretching up out of sight.
Dredd clambered up onto the mesh and began to climb the ladder. "Vix, I'm aboard. Have you still got me?"
"I have. Climbing up an extremely tall ladder. You look like a bug on a drekhouse wall."
"Vix..."
"I'm checking the top of the ladder. There's a platform over the gunwales. You'll have to step up onto that, then down onto the deck. No one about, as before."
"Acknowledged." Dredd took the last few rungs of the ladder more slowly, unholstering his Lawgiver as he reached the top. As Vix had reported there was no one in sight. Dredd leapt up onto the platform and then dropped to the deck, standing in a narrow area between the gunwales and an angled wall of stealth-plates.
The cityship was silent, save the distant bellow of the engines. Then Dredd heard another sound - a weird, directionless droning that he couldn't immediately identify. Other than that, nothing. He moved away from the gunwale and onto the open deck.
As he rounded one of the protective stealth-plates, he discovered what the droning sound was.
"Dredd?" Vix's voice was hissing in his helmet comm. "Dredd, I can't quite see you, but I can see smoke coming up. What is that?"
"It's not smoke," Dredd told her. "It's flies."
Abraxis was swarming with untold millions of flies. Clouds of them hung over the deck, swirling in great sheets and swarms around the hab-stacks and towers. Gantrywork that Dredd had taken to be painted black became abruptly metallic again as he approached, as the insects covering them leapt away. They were blocking out the sun.
"Looks like they got their Warchild casket open early," he muttered. "These people have been dead a while..."
There were corpses everywhere, lying where they had fallen and coated in a thick, living blanket of voracious insects. Most of the population of Abraxis must have stayed below decks to die, but Dredd could still see a couple of thousand, just from where he was standing.
He was accomplishing nothing here. The bridge he had seen through Vix's telescope was a few hundred metres ahead and to his right. He began to make his way through the reeking corpses towards it. As he walked, flies billowed into the air whenever he put his boot down. The cityship was a nightmare.
Vix was silent for a while. Watching Dredd through the telescope, she must have been able to see the carnage too. Dredd was doubly glad he hadn't taken Bane along - she couldn't have handled this.
Finally, as Dredd was reaching the outer levels of the bridge, Vix spoke. "What do you think, were they trying to find help? They set course for Sargasso hoping someone there could help them?"
"Reckon." Dredd skirted around a pile of bodies and found an open hatchway into the bridge tower. "I'm going in."
"Get to the main command area as fast as you can. I'll be able to see you from there."
There was a stairway up the centre of the tower. Dredd climbed it quickly, ignoring the rooms full of twisted bodies to either side, and found his way to the main bridge.
The dead comms operator was still there. There weren't nearly as many flies inside the bridge as there were on deck, but a few still buzzed out of the man's mouth as Dredd approached. "I'm here. So is our friend."
"I've got you."
The entire forward edge of the bridge was a massive bank of control boards. Dredd walked from left to right, quickly scanning the boards and memorising their positions. Within seconds he'd worked out which ones were for weapons control, which for sensors and communications.
"I've got navigation." A large, complex board towards the right of the bridge housed the directional controls. Much of it was taken up with a single monitor screen, showing the pirate city's course in a series of animated maps and charts.
He was hoping there would be a single control, something that he could operate easily and then be away. But nothing was ever that simple. The navigation board looked as though it was mainly a signalling device, issuing orders to secondary computers in the core drives and the other sternward ships.
He began tapping at the keyboard, trying to open up a command chain. A window appeared on the monitor, overlaid over the maps. Standard enough for an antique.
Dredd typed fast, setting up a linked chain of navigation commands. He'd have liked to slam Abraxis to starboard and watch the cityship come apart at the seams, but the navigation computer was too clever for that. It knew exactly how much lateral stress the huge, fluid structure of the cityship could take, and wouldn't allow Dredd to go outside those boundaries.
He had to settle for a more gentle path, easing away to starboard in a wide, hundred kilometre curve. Abraxis would get awfully close to Sargasso, but as long as the bigger cityship maintained its speed there would be n
o collision.
He keyed the execution command. The window closed and the monitor showed a new map.
"Damned antiquated systems," he growled. It would have been far easier with a modern ship where he could have just called up the central computer and told it where to go.
"Dredd?" That was Vix.
"I'm done here. On my way."
"Dredd, don't go out through the port door. I just saw part of the wall move."
Dredd brought his Lawgiver up. The Warchild that had killed all on Abraxis was less than ten metres away from him. "Keep it in sight."
He began edging towards the starboard exit. Like Sargasso, Abraxis had a bridge that was roughly symmetrical, so there was another door on the opposite side. Dredd backed towards it, keeping his Lawgiver trained on the port door.
The hatch was just behind him now. He turned smoothly, kicked it open and a blade of white bone whickered down through the air towards his head.
Dredd moved aside, feeling an impact as the blade took a few centimetres off his shoulder armour. The Warchild's other blade whipped around at gut level, but Dredd was already wise to that trick, snapping himself out of the way and countering with a solid kick to the Warchild's side.
The bioweapon went over, correcting in midair and leaping up onto the nearest control board. Its camouflage shimmered.
"Dredd! Six o'clock!"
At Vix's alarm, Dredd whipped about and put a three-shot burst of execution rounds into another Warchild's chest. He heard it shriek and saw it go down, its camouflage flashing crazily. Then the first one was on him again, blades whirling. One went diagonally through the dead comms operator's skull, shearing most of his head off. Another sliced into a control board, sending up a spray of brilliant sparks.
Dredd hurled himself away. There was no way to block those blades - from the way they went through metal and bone with such ease, they must have been edged with monomolecular fibres. He heard a blade sing through the air again and the comms operator's chair fell away in two pieces. The corpse did too.
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