The girl emerged from behind a large bio-gro box where dozens of shark-tulips were budding, their petal-like teeth grinding on mouthfuls of dead flies. She had a peculiar look on her face, a mixture of abject terror and giddy thrill. "Judge Dredd," she managed, gulping for air, "Oh, wow. Ohhh, wow."
"Hands where I can see 'em."
She did as he ordered, white-knuckled fingers still clutching the monoscope. Katy blinked. "Can I... take, uh, your picture?"
Dredd waved the spy-camera in his other hand. "Reckon you already have. Where's your book?"
The girl deflated a little, and then with delicacy she put down the scope and produced a thick album from behind a planter full of hammerhead blossoms. "I'm doing really well," she began. "Up to twenty-six point three per cent so far!" Inside the book were dozens of still images, some grainy and indistinct, some sharp and clear. All of them were of Mega-City One Judges, capturing their faces and their shields. She smiled. "I made the women's finals at BadgeCon last year!"
Badge spotting, also known as Judge-snapping and helmeting, was one of the hundreds of thousands of hobby activities enjoyed by MC-1's largely unemployed population. Along with bat-gliding, dishwashing, wibbling and, of course, Cursed Earth horticulture, Judge-snapping was just another mindless pastime to keep ordinary citizens from going insane with boredom. Officially, the Justice Department frowned on it, but it wasn't illegal to photograph a Judge, as long as it wasn't used for commercial gain, and the city's roster of serving officers was a matter of record. Intrepid badge-spotters would scour the streets with digi-cams and checklists, gathering the names of law officers and posting their "collections" on the Mega-Web. The hobby wasn't as popular as zoom-train spotting, but it was getting there. Dredd grimaced. He'd had run-ins with these kooks before, some of them getting in the way of real law enforcement.
Katy blinked at him again, tears welling up in her eyes. "You won't say anything about the spy-cam, will you, Judge? I mean, technically it's a violation of spotter by-laws and I could have my whole collection for this year declared null and void-"
"You've got bigger things to worry about," Dredd broke in, "Planting a surveillance device on Justice Department property. That's a Code Five violation."
"I did it by remote!" she insisted. "I thought it would be okay, I used a blimpy-toy to drop it there-"
"Two years in the cubes, citizen. And I guarantee you'll see plenty of Judges there."
Hart waved a hand in front of her face. "I'm not worried about that! I just don't want to lose my score!"
Dredd resisted the urge to shake his head and fixed her with a hard stare. "How long have you been taping Judges at the watch bay?"
"A couple of weeks."
"I might be willing to consider leniency, if you show a willingness to co-operate." He held out a gloved hand. "I want the recordings, Katy. Everything you have."
The girl gave a frantic nod and began rooting through a pile of vid-discs. "Oh," she mumbled to herself. "I got Dredd, I got Dredd right here in my apartment! This is gonna score me big!"
The Judge flipped to the most recent pages of the discarded album and there was a low-angle shot of Vedder, stepping off her bike. "These tapes," Dredd asked. "They got audio as well as video, right?"
A decrepit old eldo sleeping in the bus shelter at the corner of Shish and Phipps generously "donated" his radorak and, with that, Smyth's makeshift disguise was complete. Keeping himself to the shady side of the street, weaving in and out of doorways, Wess worked his way ever closer to the Barbone con-apts. He stood a very real chance of getting himself spotted and, once again, beaten to within an inch of his life, should any of Cortez's toughs be passing by, but he was a creature of habit when all was said and done. As much as the rational part of him told Smyth he should be half way across the city by now - if not in fact running for the Canadian Wastes - he was still in Double-Eight, slinking through the side-streets that had been his home ground since he was a juve. An outside observer might have thought it was a case of "better the devil you know", or just baseline cowardice on Wess's part, but it was neither. Although he had yet to admit it to himself, on some instinctual level Smyth was looking for trouble. He walked through the shadows, eyes hollow, his left hand buried in the folds of the weather-beaten old radorak, kneading his new prize with warm, sweaty fingers.
Hunger was drumming in his stomach, and Wess made a quick detour into a Burger Me franchise, shoes squeaking across the wipe-clean vinyl floor. He kept his head down, studying his feet until he was at the robo-server.
"Welcome to Burger Me. Would you like to try the new Flambé de Fungi meal with Twirler Fries?"
"Yeah, whatever," Smyth snapped, jamming his cash into the credi-slot on the chest of the robot. "And a FauxCola."
The machine cocked its head in a puppet-like gesture of synthetic sympathy. "I'm sorry sir, but we're out of FauxCola, the real fake thing. That customer has just taken the last can." Wess's hooded gaze went in the direction that the robot pointed and he almost wet himself as a result. Two queues over was Hoog, the big, bald and blue-scaled alien bruiser that Bob Toes kept as his sidekick. Wess registered several things at once: Hoog's three eyes bulging with recognition as he saw him; Toes and a couple of the guys from the ambush in a wall booth; and the sickly smell of his food order, ripe like rotting vegetation.
Hoog's mouth of tusks bared and the alien advanced on him, grinning and still bearing a tray of purchases.
Wess had made up and discarded a dozen different violent fantasies about this meeting, and none of them, not a single one, had unfolded with Smyth chancing to run into Toes and company in a cheap-ass fast food joint. He threw his flambé de fungi in Hoog's face and ran as the alien thug screamed, hot synthi-lard burning his triclopian eyes.
The door Wess took wasn't the one he'd come in by, and instead of leading to the street proper, it took him around the drive-through exit and toward a ragged chain link fence. Smyth took the path of least resistance and barrelled through the hole in the wire, scrambling across a vacant lot and toward the service alley behind the Q-Save. He heard their feet behind him, especially the scraping noise that Hoog's clawed toenails made on the ferrocrete. The alien couldn't get shoes on Earth, he remembered, only big sandals that looked really dumb with dark socks. Smyth shook the thought away with a quick jerk of the head; he had to concentrate on running.
When he took the corner, he knew instantly that he had made a fatal error. The light in the alley dimmed here in the shade of a tall megway stanchion, and the pounding race of his pursuers' footfalls suddenly slowed to a more leisurely jog. They knew what a mistake it was. Wess gaped at the blank wall blocking his way, shocked at his own blind idiocy. Of course this was a dead-end. Of course there was no way out. He'd been here untold times before - why had he forgotten it today?
"Ahhhhaaa," wheezed Hoog, through a mouthful of teeth and spittle. "Aaah!" The alien produced a phone and began the slow, laborious process of dialling a number with its big, clawed fingers. Nearby Bob Toes made that irritating tsk noise again, and Wess felt a surge of volcanic anger boil up inside his chest. He turned around slowly, vibrating with tension like a struck chord.
Toes didn't seem to notice. "Smythy. Got the cash?" He tapped his nose in a mocking gesture. "Give it to me and Hoog here might just bite off an ear." Bob puffed out his chest. "I'm guessing you don't have it, as you ran like the yellow streak spug you are."
"I... I got something," Wess stuttered. "I got something for y-you."
"Wha-?" clattered Hoog. The phone in his claw beeped as it connected.
"This!" Wess drew out his hand and with a fierce grin, gave Bob the finger. "Sneck you, you snecking snecker!" he added.
Abrupt laughter broke out between Toes's two human friends, but Bob wasn't even the slightest bit amused by Wess's sudden and daring display of backbone. "You worthless piece of klegg shit, you'll pay for that." The criminal tugged the large frame of a heavy-gauge spit gun from a shoulder holster under his coat.<
br />
It was an East-Meg Vondo FG6 Automatik with a ten-round magazine and an integral xenon laser sight. At close range, it would tear an unprotected human torso into ragged chunks of meat. Smyth didn't recall how he knew that, the information just popped right there into his forebrain the moment he laid eyes upon it. Bob's pistol came up towards him in syrupy slow motion, the maw of the barrel yawning.
From Hoog's perspective, Smyth seemed to blink, shifting in strobe-fast images instead of fluid movements. The peckerhead's left hand bolted out of the folds of his coat faster than the finger had come, and in his fist was a glinting ingot of dark metal, obsidian and monstrous. The shape screamed and darts of white fire sprang from Wess's hand, elongating into threads that lanced through Bob Toes and tore him to pieces. Hoog's boss became coils of bloody mist and steaming wet flesh. The alien swore a gutter oath in its own sibilant language, dropping the phone and scrambling to recover its own gun. As Hoog pulled at a stuck zip pocket on his coverall, Bob's two pals, the Clent brothers, were scattering. The Clents favoured short-range multi-barrel stubbers, pepperbox pistols that could discharge blunt shock loads or flechettes, depending on how the firing collar was dialled.
There were humming fizzes from the alley as low-velocity rounds slashed through the air at Wess, but Smyth was jerking like a puppet on a string, leading with the big black firearm in his hand, impossibly placing himself everywhere the shots were not. Smyth's weapon did something odd; it unfolded an extra part of itself from the muzzle, elongating its barrel. A thinner, more collimated beam of hot plasma etched a glowing line on Hoog's three retinas as it lanced through both of the Clents', coring them like munce fruit.
Hoog ripped his pocket to get his maser pistol free, only to discover to his horror that the power cell was flat. Smyth was shaking violently, every part of his body vibrating except for his gun arm. The black weapon came up to a point on Hoog's wide face where a human would have had a nose. The alien made a whimpering noise in its throat a split-second before another plasmatic dart ripped his head open.
The entire killing spree had lasted less than ten seconds, from the moment Toes drew his gun to the moment Hoog's decapitated corpse settled to its knees, desultory spits of turquoise blood jetting from the neck stump. Wess's heart hammered in his chest, adrenaline flooding through his veins. He felt giddy and nauseated, and the gun seemed to take on weight from nowhere. A moment ago, it had moved effortlessly, like a part of his body, but now it felt like it was made of lead. Smyth's wrist was tight with aches and his bones seemed brittle, as if they would break under the strain of holding the weapon. He stuffed the firearm back into his radorak, ignoring the sizzle as the still-hot barrel wilted a patch of the polypropylop coat.
Wess's foot scuffed something as he walked away, and he bent down impulsively to pick it up. Hoog's phone. The small vid-screen was blurry, but a familiar red face was peering owlishly out at him. "Hoog? That you? I heard shooting..."
Smyth leered into the camera pickup. "Flex," he spat, bile bubbling up in his throat. "Things are going to change, you musclehead juicer!" He tossed the phone away, listing like a drunk as he stumbled from the scene of the crime. "Things are gonna change!" Wess vomited violently into a dumpster and ran.
"You understand that you risk incurring our disappointment with these delays?" The faceless shadow on the monitor screen spoke with a voice so synthesised and acoustically treated that it was barely recognisable as human. "There is a timetable to which you are not privy." The faint glow of the screen was all the light there was in the blacked-out room.
Vedder kept her face neutral, just as she'd been taught by the psycho-conditioners. "I have the matter in hand."
"You do not," said the other shadow, sharing the split-screen. Only the very slightest of tonal differences indicated that this was a different speaker from the first. A woman, she guessed. "Where is the device?"
The COE agent discarded any thoughts of lying. She was sure they knew the answer already. "It will be recovered in due course. This setback will be overcome quickly."
"Dredd is involved," said the first. "His interference is the last thing we want."
"He's inconsequential," Vedder replied. "I'm monitoring him. If, by some fluke he stumbles on to the device, then I'll simply use Dredd to secure it and then kill him."
"Many have tried. None have succeeded." The second shadow rumbled. "Dredd is a wild card. I want this situation resolved before he ever has a chance to comprehend the scope of it."
Vedder nodded. "That is also my intention."
"We initiated this operation in order to make sure the unit did not slip through our fingers, and yet that is exactly what has happened, thanks to your poor planning, Judge Vedder." Reproach leaked from the first shadow's words. "We have a strategy for the device which cannot get underway until we have recovered it."
"I am well aware of the value of the unit." This time Vedder let a little annoyance slip out. "You'll get your tests." Before either of the anonymous voices could reply, she reached out and deactivated the communicator. Pausing only to attach a small thermite charge to destroy the screen, and any genetic traces she might have left in the room, Vedder exited, brooding.
The footage was grainy and blurred in places, but the definition was high enough for Dredd to recognise the COE Judge framed by the glow of traffic passing below her. Citizen Hart's spy-cam had caught more than just the typical duty officers pausing in the watch bay to report in, or conduct traffic control. Dredd turned up the gain on his bike computer's monitor screen and listened carefully to the faint audio pickup. Now and then he caught the odd word from Vedder, as the wind carried her voice towards the concealed place where the spy-cam had been hidden. Something about an "operation" and "schedules".
"Who were you talking to, Vedder?" he asked aloud. "Who's in on this thing?"
As if in reply, Dredd heard the sound of his own voice replayed through the tape. "Watch bay Bravo 63 Delta, this is Dredd. We got a wrecker situation brewing up ahead, or haven't you heard?" On the screen, Vedder threw a disinterested glance over the guardrail and then away again. Dredd's mouth twisted at the Judge's blatant violation of department standing orders as she ignored his signal, reaching for the squawk box on the bay wall to switch it off. Dredd tapped the fast-forward control and wound on a few minutes more, up to the time index just before the explosion. Vedder reacted to something, following a vehicle on the highway below from left to right through her binoculars as it passed beneath the watch bay. From the spy-cam's angle it was impossible to see what she was looking at, but there was little doubt in Dredd's mind it was the featureless grey truck. He watched with a slight sneer of amusement as the fireball erupted off-camera, illuminating Vedder's pale face with stark orange-red highlights. Her expression was unchanged.
"Almost like she expected it..." He slowed the playback as the woman ran for her Lawmaster and roared away down the off-ramp. Dredd watched the recording a second time and then sat back in the saddle, thinking. Was it possible that Vedder had been in the midst of that confusion as well? He'd seen other Judges moving around in the smoke and chaos and assumed it was Leary and her men - but it could just as easily have been Vedder, sneaking through the fire to the truck. He tapped his chin, working out the angles to the situation. Was it Vedder who had stolen the cargo, on the orders of her COE masters or on her own? Or had someone else got to it before her, in those moments when the skedway had been engulfed in flames? If, as he strongly suspected, it was Vedder that had forged Tyler's ident code to have the evidence destroyed, what was her motive? Dredd frowned. He had nothing but questions and circumstantial evidence, but the mystery of it was gnawing at him. Sometimes he wondered if it was a factor in his genetic make-up, some holdover from the cellular legacy of his clone-father Judge Fargo, a built-in tenacity and focus that simply could not let something like this go unanswered.
A chime from his headset communicator sounded, and Dredd tapped his helmet. "Dredd, responding."
"I
t's Tyler. I've got a lead, but you're not going to like it."
"Right now anything will sound good. Let's hear it."
The Tek-Judge hunched over his console, keeping his voice low. "I ran a general sweep of the city records for trucks matching the make and model of the one you found on the sked. I got hundreds of hits, most of them inconsequential. The majority of the vehicles are owned by small corporations, delivery firms, that sorta thing-"
"Cut to the chase, Tyler," Dredd replied.
"Uh, yeah. Well. I ran the sweep again today just to double-check I hadn't missed anything, but I was tired and gettin' a little punchy. By mistake, I tagged the search parameters to check non-civilian concerns as well as citizen owners... And something weird came up."
"Weird, huh?" He could hear the sneer in Dredd's voice. "Explain."
"There's one facility in MC-1 that purchased five of these trucks a couple of years ago for what's listed as 'non-specific special duties'. The weird bit is, all five trucks were listed as scrapped in a city audit a few months later... but there's no record of them ever being recycled or destroyed."
Dredd felt a tingle in the tips of his fingers, the same faint touch of adrenaline he got whenever a hard, solid clue presented itself to him. "Who bought the trucks, Tyler?"
"MAC has the registrations listed to the motor pool at the West 17 Test Labs complex, MegWest Sector 202." The Luna-City Judge paused. "If there's anyone in the Big Meg with the hardware to make the modifications we saw, its West 17."
The senior Judge nodded to himself. It was a good fit for the facts to hand. He thumbed the ignition stud on his Lawmaster's handlebar and revved the engine. "I don't have to tell you to keep this compartmentalised, Tyler. I'm heading to West 17 now... I'll shake the tree a little and see what falls out."
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