Whiteout

by James Swallow

  The Judge rode down across the slip road and headed westward, toward the forest of looming processor stacks in Double-Eight's industrial district. The indistinct glow of the RubbaBaby Company's holographic billboard hovered in the distance, a bloated cartoon infant with a single, protruding tooth in its goofy smile.

  The glint of light off a lens suddenly drew Dredd's attention up from the highway to a grey stone half-arch above. It was a watch bay, one of thousands of elevated parking areas reserved for Judges dotted around the city. Officers on patrol would routinely check in and observe the traffic from the bays, watching for signs of trouble. In the handful of seconds it took Dredd to spot the figure standing up there he had already halved the distance to the arch. It was a Judge and a Lawmaster, the officer studying the highway through a pair of magnoculars. In itself that was nothing out of the ordinary, but the message from Justice Central had ordered all available officers in the area to converge on Junction 846; the Judge was deliberately ignoring that demand.

  "Watch bay Bravo 63 Delta, this is Dredd," he growled into his radio. "We got a wrecker situation brewing up ahead, or haven't you heard?" He raced under the arch, glancing over his shoulder in time to see the Judge throw him a look. Whoever it was up there, they'd heard him. When no reply came, Dredd thumbed a control on the bike's console, pulling up the identity code for the silent Judge. All Lawmasters broadcast an encrypted transponder signal to other Justice Department units, and if the officer in the watch-bay wasn't going to answer him, Dredd would find out who the hell they were.

  "Restricted data," said the Lawmaster's computer. "Access denied."

  Dredd frowned and punched in his personal security clearance, glancing up as the sign for junction 846 rose up before him.

  Reluctantly, the computer gave him a terse response. "Judge ident: Vedder, Thessaly. COE. Current assignment: classified."

  The senior Judge began to slow, heading for the emergency lane where two other Lawmasters were parked, but his thoughts held fast to the three-letter abbreviation attached to Vedder's code. COE; the Covert Operations Establishment was the city's pro-active external intelligence arm, one of the most secret divisions of the Justice Department. Some street Judges called it the "spook squad", much to the amusement of Psi-Division's actual ghost-hunting department; but COE agents had their own term for the group. They called it "the Company", a throwback to the organisations that had been the progenitors of the group, with acronyms like NSA, CTU, SD-6 and CIA. Vedder - it wasn't a name that Dredd recognised, but the presence of a COE operative anywhere was a red flag. He rolled his bike to a halt and a waiting female Judge acknowledged him with a nod.

  "Dredd." She saw the set of his chin and paused. "Problem?"

  "We'll see, Leary." He put aside all thought of Vedder for the moment. "What's the situation?"

  "Got word that a gang are gonna hit the junction. I've put an H-Wagon on overwatch," she jerked her thumb at the sky. "We got nothing yet."

  "Could be a false alarm," said one of the other officers.

  "Don't count on it." Dredd looked back along the highway, to where the arch of the watch-bay was barely visible.

  Wess coughed into the sleeve of his coat, and it came away with a muddy red stain on it. He winced, jabs of needle-sharp pain stabbing into him along the lines of his bruised ribs and thighs. His skin down there was a mess of purpling blotches and shallow cuts. For the fourth time in as many minutes, he tried adjusting his posture in the driving seat, but nothing seemed to ease his discomfort. The pathetic suspension in the podcar rattled him each time the vehicle rolled over a seam in the highway slab, as if it were shoving him in the back like some harsh reminder of his own stupidity. He glanced up through the spider-webbed plasteen of the windscreen and saw a dozen little reflections of himself. Smyth's face, the skin tight and swollen, made him look like some kind of mutie, his nose puffed up to twice normal size and his right eye a bloodshot mess. He wanted to urinate, but Wess was petrified that he would pass out from the agony of pissing blood. Looking away, he saw the automapper blinking green and white as the car changed lanes and accelerated. It had been all he could do to crawl into the vehicle and mumble a destination to it. His lips were so thick that it had taken three attempts just to make himself understood by the voice recognition system.

  Smyth took a painful breath, ghostly knives jabbing into him, and eyed the digi-map. Just over the junction and down the underzoom to Sector 87, and he'd be at Tricke's House O'Pods ("Pods! Pods!! Pods!!!" went the holo-sign) where he intended to use his poor state to elicit some sympathy from Tricke Yipple, former drinking partner and ex-gang buddy in the days when they had both been members of the Hunklev Hunka Boyz.

  Tricke wasn't really a soft touch, but he had a blind spot where Wess was concerned, over a misunderstanding that make him think Smyth had saved his life as a youngster. In truth, it had been a civic-minded citizen who pulled an unconscious little Yipple from the overturned robo-bus, but even at that tender age Wess was smart enough to take credit for someone else's work - especially when that someone had been killed instants later when the bus had fallen on him. Originally, Smyth had intended to parlay his wretched car into some cash by off-loading it on Tricke, but now that Flex and his cronies had reduced the already pathetic value of the pod with baseball bats and rocks, he was hoping to play the "you're my last hope" ploy instead. Tricke Yipple's greatest achievement was getting out from under in Sector 88 and making himself into a businessman - but his greatest error was not getting far enough away from his old pal Wess before he did it. Smyth coughed out another globule of bloody spittle. In a way, Flex's beating might actually have been a good thing, because it was sure to make Yipple part with more creds than normal. Wess sniffed as something like self-respect threatened to rise up among his thoughts, and he quashed the emotion with force. He had no time for that stomm. This was about cold, hard, cash.

  Smyth glanced out of the window and saw a handful of Judges parked in the shadow of a support stanchion. The automatic reaction that came over him whenever he spied the big gold eagle shoulder pads twisted in his gut, and he groaned. If any one of them saw the broken windscreen, they'd pull him over for a moving violation and then he'd have to explain his sorry state. With his Fight Club membership long-expired, Smyth would have no excuse. But they didn't come after him, even though Wess kept craning his neck to look out of the back window just in case the red, white and blue strobes lit the evening.

  He was still looking backwards when the highway in front of the podcar became a lake of raging fire.

  Tyler blinked and rocked back from the scanner hood, pinching the bridge of his nose. His head itched underneath the open-face helmet and he longed to take it off. It wasn't his size, but it was Mega-City regs so he had to wear it.

  "You okay?" Tek-Judge Clark looked back at him through thick data-spex, lines of code scrolling down past his eyes.

  Tyler gave a wan smile. "Just tired. I'm havin' trouble sleeping down here. Must be the gravity change."

  "Huh," Clark smirked. "Loonies. Got no stomach for travel. You should try a TRI back at Justice Central. Ten minutes in there gives you a night's full rest."

  "No thanks," he replied. "Fake sleep ain't like the real thing." The tubular Total Relaxation Inducers at the precinct house reminded him too much of coffins. In fact, Tyler had no idea why he was suffering from such severe insomnia, but ever since his secondment to Mega-City One from the Luna-1 colony, he'd been up all night and sluggish all day. Perhaps it was something to do with going from the Moon city's simulated one-gee to a real, authentic one-g environment that made him sleepless... Or perhaps it was the weird chill he got whenever he looked up into the night sky and saw not a blue-white marble, but a grey disc of stone. His home. He shook off the thoughts and dropped his face back to the scanner, reading the wave of feedback rolling out of the sensor pallet on the bottom of the H-Wagon. He could see the collection of heat blobs that were Leary and the other Judges, the thermal blooms of
electro-motors racing past in the traffic, even the commas of orange where hot tires made marks on the ferrocrete invisible to the naked eye; but no sign of anything suspicious. Frowning, Luna Tek-Judge Tyler switched across the scan spectra, going to infrared, ultra-violet, meson decay and etheric reflection settings, each time finding nothing but blank.

  "Wait a second. I think I got something."

  On the monitor screen, an egg-shaped six-wheeler started a controlled skid toward the median strip. There were no life-signs on board, but there was the telltale glow of an uncontrolled thermochemical reaction in the cargo hold.

  "Target!" Tyler's cry galvanised the Judges on the ground. "Yellow Orbis slabster, lane two!"

  "There!" Dredd was already sprinting toward his bike as the vehicle skidded past the Judges and sideswiped a mopad bedsit. The slabster fishtailed wildly and hit the highway barrier with a crash and the flat thud of combustion. An orange fireball engulfed the vehicle and grew into a sphere of bright colour; Dredd instinctively brought up his arm to shield his face just as a flat wall of superheated air slammed him off his bike and onto the roadway. He tumbled and rolled, catching the sounds of screams and secondary explosions. Fire licked at him and he scrambled to his feet. Someone had tried to cook him alive once tonight, and he was in no mood to go through the same experience again. Panting, the Judge brushed off a flaming ember and surveyed the scene.

  The slabster had clearly been packed with flammables; like the old naval tactic of floating a fire ship into the middle of an enemy fleet, the wreckers had set an inferno that was spreading across the eastbound lanes of Braga Skedway and threatening to hop the strip and engulf the westside traffic as well. Smoke, thick and acrid, rolled across the sea of fire. Dredd tasted sour chemical flavours on his tongue, a sure signature of improvised munitions. He caught a glimpse of Leary and the other Judges, shouting into radios and calling for backup. Dredd grimaced, counting a half-dozen vehicles blown aside in the initial blast or mired in the firestorm. Glasseen popped and shattered with the heat, and people were screaming. The Judge tugged his respirator into place and waded into the carnage, alert for citizens in danger as much as he was for the imminent arrival of the wreckers.

  By coincidence, the wrecking crew had got their recipe for homemade napalm from the same place as the teenage Global Anarchist Army: Give 'Em Hell, a banned manual on urban guerrilla warfare, written in the late 2080s by members of the Fresno Militia, a part of Mega-City Two that had briefly seceded before the west coast Judges had bombed them back into the stone age. The book circulated on the Mega-Web despite all the attempts of the Justice Department to stamp it out, and in an ill-advised effort to solve the nagging problem, a bright MC-2 Tek-Judge programmer had created a worm program that sought out the text and edited it. Built-in safeguards made it impossible to erase Give 'Em Hell entirely, but the Judges were able to change it just enough that the bomb-making formulae were all wrong. Instead of electing to make the recipes inert, they decided to made them more volatile - reasoning that anyone dumb enough to make use of it would blow themselves up sooner or later, thus saving the Judges the job of arresting them. To say the idea backfired was an understatement.

  Thus, what the wreckers expected to be a nasty but brief fire was rapidly spreading across the megway in a red flood of flames. Smarter criminals would have cut and run; but then smarter criminals wouldn't have downloaded a handbook on explosives from the Web without checking if it was kosher first.

  There were pools of burning fuel and bubbling tarmac across the highway in fiery islands, thick fumes coiling up from them, swathing the scene in a hellish light. Distantly, vehicle horns and sirens hooted as more oncoming traffic screeched to a halt, causing tailbacks and logjams along the sked.

  Dredd's daystick made short work of the coach window. He pulled at the flexible plastic, tearing it from its mount. Inside, panicked passengers boiled up in a surge of terrified faces and grabbing hands. The Judge banged the stick hard on the side of the vehicle. "No pushing, no shoving! I see anyone gettin' clever and I'll knock you out myself!"

  "Judge! Judge!" A skinny juve, all spiky hair and vu-glo jacket, tugged at Dredd's elbow pad.

  "What did I just say, creep?"

  "No, no - behind you! Look!"

  Against his better judgement, Dredd threw a look over his shoulder, and sneered when he realised what he was seeing. From out of the smoke-choked air there were shapes descending among plumes of smoke, hooded figures brandishing long-handled hammers, crude morningstars, fire axes and chains. "That's a new wrinkle."

  The wreckers were coming in on jetpacks, picking their places among the patches of highway still untouched by the fires. As he watched, one of them misjudged his landing and fell into a column of flame from a burning car; none of his cohorts spared him a second glance, simply going to work on the hapless cits trapped in the other vehicles.

  "You people, get to safety!" Dredd dropped from the vehicle's flank and sprinted toward the wreckers, drawing his Lawgiver. "H-Wagon!" he shouted. "Where are you?"

  From somewhere overhead came the pilot's anxious voice. "Can't get close! The thermals from the fires are making it impossible."

  "Drokk!" One of the perps was bending over a roadster convertible, menacing the driver with a las-knife. Dredd swept in from behind him and cracked the wrecker across the crown of the skull, dropping him to the ground. He nudged the road pirate with his boot, catching the insignia on the jetpack in the flickering light.

  "Property of Johnny Ainsworth Block Sports Centre," he read aloud. In the back of his mind, the Judge remembered an item on the morning briefing logs a few days earlier - someone had broken into the block stadium at Ainsworth and stolen all the game armour and gear from the jetball team. One more mystery solved. Dredd put a plasti-strip holding cuff around the wrecker's wrists and ankles and then moved into the thick of the clouds. He heard gunfire - standard execution rounds by the sound of it - and nodded. Leary and the others were doing as he was, moving through the smoke and wreckage, picking off the perps one by one.

  "Control," he murmured, sub-vocalising into his throat mic. "ETA on fire rescue units?"

  "Still working on it, Dredd. Most of the local tenders are tied up with that incident at Chet Hunklev."

  "Not good enough! I've got an accelerating situation here! We need options, fast."

  A different voice broke in on the general channel. "Uh, Dredd? I might have somethin'."

  "Identify yourself."

  "Tyler," said the voice. "Tek-Judge Tyler, on transfer from Luna-1. I was, uh, part of the investigation last year when that creep Moonie tried to take over-"

  Dredd gave a terse nod. "Yeah, sure. I remember. We can talk about old times later. What have you got?"

  In the H-Wagon, Tyler gripped his console tightly as the flyer bounced around in the choppy air. "Air traffic over the skedway, Dredd. There's a weather control drone platform up here with us. It's on standby mode right now, programmed for clear skies, but-"

  Dredd saw where he was going instantly. "You can make it rain."

  "Roger that. I can give you a torrential downpour, if I can co-opt the command software."

  "Do it," snapped the Judge. "We gotta damp this down before it gets out of control."

  Wess Smyth's last sight of his podcar - and with it, his final hope of ever making any kind of money - was the polyprop bubble of the little buggy's carapace deflating like a balloon. The heat from the fires had already melted the rubbereen tires to the road, and by the time Wess had scrambled away, burning his hands on the hot asphalt, it was already starting to flow like a waxwork. The battery pack in the trunk gave a desultory chug of venomous fumes as it caught fire; and then the podcar was well and truly a wreck in every sense of the word.

  Surrounded by smoke and flame, Wess's swollen lips trembled and he felt the urge to whimper in his chest. This was hell, he decided. He had gone to hell, just taken the wrong off-ramp and ended up in the land of fiery rivers and boiling sulphur
. Wess stumbled forwards, the acrid fumes stinging his eyes, the chemical fug tearing every last molecule of breathable air from his lungs.

  In amongst the clouds of smoke he saw moving shapes. Some looked like people, others were hooded things with hammers growing out of their hands. Smyth panicked and ran from them, turning back and forth on himself as he found his path blocked by overturned vehicles or thick sheets of orange fire. Blinded by the drifting ribbons of darkness and by his own terror, Wess blundered into a cargo truck that had thrown itself up onto the median strip after clipping a flaming van. He tripped over and fell against it.

  It was cold. A thin sheen of water droplets covered the smooth steel hull of the big jugger-lorry. Wess saw the dirty handprint he'd left on the vehicle and gawped at it. A little way along the side of the cargo pod there was a hatch. The impact had popped the door open. From inside spilled white neon light.

  And like the petty thief he was, in deference to all his years of small-time crime and self-interest, Wess's first thought was not "Is anyone in there alive?" but "Is anything in there I can steal?"

  Drawn by the glow, Smyth's worries about his current predicament waned and he reached for the hatch rim. It came open easily to present him with the transporter's sparse interior - and the sole item of cargo within it.

  These punks were organised. Dredd approached, crouched low to minimise his silhouette, using a blackened taxi for cover. In a clear portion of the road they were dumping plastic sacks of loot, ducking back into the smoke in search of more stranded victims to plunder. A single wrecker, a stocky guy with a machete in his grip, stood guard. Dredd squared his shoulders and stepped out, Lawgiver raised.