Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  "I've been doing this job too long. You know something? Back when I started as skipper, I would have looked at Abraxis and thought, wow, that's going to keep us in salvage forever. Now I can't even bring myself to look at it."

  "That's command, Quint. You're in charge of people, and people die. That's the job." Dredd nodded sternwards. "Think on this: if you hadn't salvaged a hellfire torpedo all those years back, you wouldn't be standing here."

  Quint was silent for a long time before he gave a bitter chuckle. "Well, if those Sovs will keep leaving bits of submarine lying about..."

  "You came up with the goods, Quint. No one on this city will say you didn't."

  "And you, Judge Dredd? For a Mega-City man, you're not a half-bad sailor."

  "I'll keep the day job, thank. In the meantime, I need a word with your shaman."

  The Old Man was up high, on top of one of the hab stacks. Dredd had to climb three ladders to get to him.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the top hab, looking out at the Abraxis. The cityship was halfway gone, with several hulls almost vertical in the water, tearing their way gradually free and sinking below the oily waves. The process would continue for a while yet, but all the time it did the two cityships would be moving further apart.

  "Judge Dredd," said Caine, not looking round. "Come to say hello?"

  "I've come to find out where you saw the Warchild, Old Man." Dredd stood next to him, his boots planted firmly on the hab roof. A tangy and acidic breeze whipped up at him. "Which ship?"

  "I don't know." Caine pointed vaguely forwards. "Somewhere over there. But it's not important."

  "I'll be the judge of that."

  The Old Man looked up at him, squinting into the daylight. "You know how I work, Dredd? How I do what I do?"

  "Some mutant ability, that's all I need to know. More than that, I couldn't care less."

  Caine ignored him. "Patterns, Dredd. That's what it's all about. Everything makes patterns: you, me, the Warchild, this city, your city... Look deep enough, and you'll see the signs. You can find out anything about anything, if you can read the patterns right."

  "And you can fool a lot of people out of their money if you get the mumbo-jumbo right, eh, Methuselah?"

  Caine roared with laughter. "Yes, that too. But I found out something about your Warchild when we met. Something quite important."

  "Okay, I'll bite." Dredd leaned close to Caine's face. "Impress me."

  "It's dying."

  There was a pause. "Go on."

  The Old Man shrugged. "What more can I say? It has massive internal injuries, shrapnel wounds. Only one arm. From what I could see, it looked as though someone had dropped it from a great height. Or dropped something heavy on it." He sniffed. "Possibly both."

  "I wonder." Dredd straightened, looking out over the city. "It can self-repair. We know that from Hellermann."

  "Grud rest her damaged little soul. Only to a limited degree, and if it can ingest enough biomass. But past a certain point, the energy levels required for it to regenerate its structure are greater than it can gain, no matter how much it eats." The Old Man smiled a secret smile. "Hellermann would have told you that, I think."

  "So it's dying. How long will it take?"

  Caine gave a shrug. "Longer than I will."

  "You look all right to me."

  "Well," Caine shifted a little on the deck. "A man's heart should beat, don't you think? Mine hasn't since the Warchild put his claw through me. I rather miss the sound of it."

  "Are you telling me you've been walking around for half a day without a heartbeat?"

  The man nodded. "Ask your Judge Peyton, he seems rather good." Then he stretched and sighed. "No, there's no time. It's goodbye, I'm afraid."

  Dredd was suddenly unsure of what he was seeing here. "Caine-"

  "Do something for me, Judge. Tell Gethsemane Bane that one day, she'll skipper this city." Then he gave Dredd a mischievous sideways grin. "On second thoughts, don't. Better to find out that kind of thing on your own, hmm?"

  And he closed his eyes.

  There were a lot of bodies to bury on Sargasso, and not much time to do it. Lying in state wasn't a good idea when there were Black Atlantic insects around, hungry for a meal and a place to start a family. Most of the dead would be weighted and dropped into the water en masse.

  But the Old Man was different. As Bane had once told Judge Dredd, in his way he had been the heart of the city.

  The funeral took place in the harbour, and was simple enough. Bane herself had wrapped the tiny, frail body in tarpaulin, and weighted it with chain. Then six skipper's men, Philo Jennig among them, had brought out a long crate. Bane lifted the body into it.

  Before they closed the lid, they put some bottles of liquor in there with him, the ones with the charms around the neck. Just in case.

  Gethsemane Bane was rather surprised to find herself still dry-eyed. She had thought when the Old Man finally passed on, that she would cry an ocean. Effectively he was her last remaining family. But after hearing about his past she realised that she couldn't shed him any tears. Not because of any evil he might have done in the past - that had been over almost before she was born. No, it was because she knew that he had finally got what he wanted after all this time.

  He had peace. And a few good bottles of booze.

  They took the body to the quayside. The harbour pool was open to the sea and away from the worst of the stern wake by necessity. Anything dropped there would be under the waves before the turbulence touched it, and heading for bottom by the quickest, smoothest route there was.

  Oddly, the Mega-City Judges were there, but standing a respectful distance away. Bane couldn't quite work out why and she wasn't about to ask. But she had a feeling that for them, if they were there when one fallen Sargassan was sent on his final journey, it would be as if they had watched them all go.

  Land-folk. Bane shook her head, silently. She could never understand them.

  The crate containing the Old Man was heavy with all that chain. Bane helped the skipper's men lift it to the edge of the quay and slide it forward. It disappeared beneath the surface without fuss and was swallowed by the inky water.

  Bane watched it go and raised her head. Something had moved, up above the harbour doors.

  It took her a second to see it. "Oh, drokk!"

  The Warchild had found them.

  It was crouched in the door mechanisms, up on the huge horizontal shaft that connected the two drive motors. Its camouflage pulsed feebly and Bane could see that its damaged arm was still a shrivelled, opened wreck.

  The quayside was suddenly a mass of screams and people running for cover. Bane scampered back to where the Judges had spread out, aiming their Lawgivers: Dredd left-handed, Peyton clutching his tightly in both fists, Vix with her free hand across her middle. Bane got behind Dredd, as it was probably the safest place to be.

  The Warchild seemed to notice the Judge. It cocked its head slightly to one side and jumped. It hit the quayside, hard, with both feet, then raised itself to full height. It stood, swaying. Its arm-blade was already extended.

  Dredd stepped forwards, Lawgiver centred on the creature's forehead. "Your move, creep," he snarled.

  The Warchild slowly raised its blade past attack position until it was vertical - almost in salute.

  And then it leapt.

  Dredd's Lawgiver thumped once. The shot took the Warchild in the face.

  The creature slowed, and stumbled to a halt. It seemed to look at Dredd hard, one last time. Then it stepped off the quay.

  Roughly seven thousand people had died when the Elektra Maru tore itself free of Sargasso. The exact number was impossible to know since so many had been washed overboard, smashed to atoms by the falling food ship and incinerated by the Kraken's plasma flare. Their bodies would never be found. It would be months before all the missing were listed. If they ever were.

  The plague had taken more than twelve hundred. The Warchild had killed at le
ast twenty-one, not counting Hellermann and the dead Judges. Out of a population of nearly a million, the numbers were perhaps quite small. But they would remain part of Sargasso's history for as long as the cityship roamed the Black Atlantic.

  Bane never saw the Warchild again. Later, on the deck of the Putin, she told Dredd that there was no way it could have survived. "You shot it through the face, Dredd. It had no brains left. Besides, it went under so fast."

  Dredd's lip twisted. "Your Old Man walked around for half a day without his heart beating. On this ship, anything's possible."

  Ahead of them a great, lumpy-looking machine was resting on the deck, just ahead of the bridge. There were big eagles painted onto it - Justice Department symbols. It had extended a ramp several minutes earlier, and the bodies of Hellermann, Larson and Adams had been loaded on board.

  The three remaining Judges had been there to watch it land and had waited for the bodies to go on. Once that was done, there was no longer a reason for them to stay.

  Dredd turned to her. "That's my ride."

  "I'd guessed that. Dredd?"

  "Hmm?"

  "You gonna make that assault charge stick?"

  "I'll think about it. Given that it was Vix you hit hardest." With that, he strode away, up the ramp and into the machine. Peyton gave her a rueful grin.

  "That's kinda like 'Thanks' in Dredd-speak," he told her. "Take care, captain."

  Vix was looking at her. She could tell, even though the skull-emblazoned helmet hid most of the woman's face. "What?"

  The SJS Judge shook her head. "Nothing," she replied quietly. "Stay out of trouble, mu-"

  She stopped. "Bane," she said finally, and followed the other two up the ramp.

  Bane watched her go. Suddenly, she found herself grinning. She leapt up and down, waving madly. "Bye, Vix!" she called. "Hope your boss doesn't have you killed!"

  Vix paused for a second at the top of the ramp. She didn't turn around, but she did wince visibly, almost as if imagining a blade in the back of her neck. Then she strode forward and was gone.

  The machine turned on its drives, heavy turbines whining into life and sending spray whipping up off the deck. Massive landing struts folded back into its base. The machine drifted up, closing its ramp as it went, and then it tipped to one side and hurtled away.

  In seconds it was a dot. Bane watched it for a long time.

  Then she walked away, back across the teeming decks of the Sargasso, towards the harbour. There was fuel to be bought and paid for, damage to the gunwales and the cranes, and a windshield to be fixed.

  Salvage didn't just scoop itself out of the water.

  Gethsemane Bane had a lot to do. She grinned, and increased her pace, arms swinging as she headed back to her ship.

  EPILOGUE

  Gosnold Seamount - one week later.

  As he strapped himself into the cockpit of the seeker pod and locked down the hatch, Zheng Zhijian knew the honour of the Chaoyang rode entirely on his shoulders.

  Captain Shao himself had come down from the bridge to see him off. It was a mark of great respect to Zheng to even see the captain face to face, let alone for the man to shake his hand. Zheng had only realised the true nature of the honour when Shao had leaned close to him during the handshake and whispered in his ear that, should he fail in his mission this time, he may as well try to point the seeker pod at Mega-City One and just keep going, because the bay door of the Chaoyang would not open for him again.

  In other words, if the Abraxis wreck site did not turn up an intact bioweapon, Zheng was a dead man. The seeker pod was fantastically resilient, built to withstand the crushing pressures of the deepest ocean trenches, but the Black Atlantic had already begun to eat its way through the hull.

  The bay sealed itself around him and filled rapidly with water. Zheng began to take the seeker pod through its pre-launch checks, tapping at the band of touchpads that ringed the observation dome. The little submarine seemed to be performing well, despite what the Atlantic had done to its outer casing.

  The seeker pod was very small and Zheng had to pilot it lying on his belly. His head and hands were completely inside the synthetic-diamond dome at its prow, which gave him a superb view of his surroundings. It also helped offset the claustrophobia caused by being wrapped in a coffin-sized cylinder of metal at the bottom of the ocean, in pressures that would crush a man to a pulp in a second.

  Zheng put such things out of his mind and keyed the release signal. He had work to do.

  Below him, the bay door hinged open from the stern, forming a long ramp down into darkness. Zheng felt the pod drop and lurch as the holding clamps let it go, then he opened the twin throttles and sent the machine scooting down the ramp. For a second the flattened, manta-like bulk of Chaoyang's belly scanned above him, then he was in open water.

  According to Sino-Cit intelligence reports, the wreckage of the cityship Abraxis had come to rest across the Gosnold Seamount, an underwater mountain that rose to almost fifteen hundred metres below the surface. This was easily within the seeker pod's capabilities, but the Chaoyang could not go nearly so deep. Zheng had to take the pod down in steep dive for the first hour of his mission.

  Although all Atlantic water was acidic and poisonous, the pollutants that turned it black tended to congregate at the surface. At two hundred metres down the Chaoyang had been drifting in water that was relatively clear. As Zheng dove deeper still, the water around him grew more and more transparent. There was no light, of course - he had to activate his flood lamps as soon as he had left the bay - but their cones seemed to stretch out forever in front of him.

  At twelve hundred metres his sonar began to pick up the top of the Seamount. He keyed his comms unit. "Seeker One to Chaoyang. Come in"

  "Base here, Zheng. Don't tell me you've found something."

  Zheng made a face. "Don't get impatient, Li. I'm just reaching the peaks."

  "Okay, Zheng. Next time I need to find a mountain, I'll send you to look for it."

  Chaoyang had already tracked down the four Warchild caskets, all those that had not been picked up by scavengers. It hadn't been easy. Their broadcast frequencies had been supplied by Dr Hellermann before she had been arrested, but the Black Atlantic was a difficult place to search. On their second day out, they'd had to torpedo a megashark, and things hadn't got much better after that.

  The first two cryopods had been on the surface, but by the time the Chaoyang had tracked down the other two the Atlantic's corrosive waters had broken through their seals, sending them to the bottom. The caskets and their contents had been designed to withstand a lot, but not the hammering weight of three thousand metres of acidic seawater. The caskets had been crumpled wrecks when Zheng had brought them aboard with the seeker pod, and their contents were so pulped that not even their DNA could be usefully extracted.

  The pods on the surface were useless, too. Their countdown timers had reached zero and without other instructions they had simply opened, dumping their newborn contents into the sea. The area was known to be the feeding grounds of slick-eels and a particularly large variety of hellsquid, and so the retrieval of the bioweapons had been classed as "unlikely".

  As pilot of the Chaoyang's primary seeker pod, it had been Zheng who had brought each ruined, opened pod aboard in the machine's robot grabs. Thus, the dishonour of failure was his, four times over.

  At sixteen hundred metres the pod's sensors began to pick up large amounts of metal. Zheng levelled the sub out and began to drift down horizontally, turning the machine on its axis as he did so.

  Suddenly, a wall of metal scanned passed the dome.

  Zheng yelped and hit the stops. When the pod was still he twisted the controls, turning the machine very slowly around. He brought it to rest with the flood lamps making twin discs of light on the hull of a chem-tanker.

  The vast ship was resting almost vertically, its bow buried in the surface of the Seamount. Zheng brought the pod around until he was alongside the deck, then be
gan to move down very slightly sideways, keeping the pools of light from his flood lamps steady on the side of the hull.

  The further down he went, the more the wreckage of Abraxis rose up around him.

  Within minutes he was surrounded by a forest of metal. He slowed his descent, letting the pod's sensors build up a model of the ruin around him. The cityship had come apart on its way to the seabed, the links between its component ships shearing and tearing free as the holed sections dragged their intact neighbours beneath the waves. By the time Abraxis hit the seamount, it had ceased to be a single, cohesive unit and had become a broad field of shattered metal ten kilometres across.

  This, Zheng decided, was going to take a lot of searching.

  Forty minutes later, one of his sensor readouts began to chime. He almost ignored it, as he was concentrating his attention on the pattern-recognition and DNA tracer systems. Zheng had gone down to the seamount hoping to find the body of one of the Warchild units lying intact, so it could be retrieved and dissected back in Sino-Cit. The motion sensor wasn't his primary concern.

  Zheng frowned and studied the readout more closely. There was movement down here, that was certain. Not fast, and not coming towards him, which was a bonus. But the sensor had been programmed to screen out things like waving fronds of seaweed or objects drifting in the current. If the sensor was chiming, it meant that there was something alive on the Gosnold Seamount.

  "Seeker One to Chaoyang. I'm getting movement down here. Going weapons-hot."

  "Acknowledged, Zheng. Try not to blow yourself up."

  Zheng made an obscene hand gesture towards the comm but kept his silence. If he'd activated his weapons array without informing the base ship he would have been in even more trouble.

  It was probably just a slick-eel anyway, feeding on the corpses that had come down with Abraxis. And there were a lot of those. Zheng angled the seeker pod towards the source of movement, and throttled very gently forwards.