On his return to Justice Central, the Tek-Judge had called Dredd to a hushed conference - not in the Tek-Labs, but on the Grand Hall of Justice's roof, where the howl of the wind and the keening of H-Wagons made eavesdropping impossible.
As Tyler had hinted, while Dredd had been out on the street a freak accident inside the med-bay cryo-mortuary had resulted in the premature freeze-burning of more than a dozen corpses. Loengard's body had been among them, and the damage to the dead man was so great that an autopsy would have been hopelessly compromised. Like the disposal of the stealth truck, it was too damn convenient to be a coincidence. The idea that someone like Vedder - and who the drokk else could it have been? - could walk around the Hall of Justice unchallenged and destroy evidence at will made Dredd's gut twist. He sent a directive to MAC to locate the woman, but the order bounced back with a non-compliance notice seconds after he posted it. Even Woburn and her SJS had paled at Dredd's demand to find Vedder and drag the truth out of her. For a brief moment, the Judge had almost considered taking this to DeKlerk's door; but the COE's Special Investigator was on the Council of Five, and without something - anything - substantial to pin on Vedder, Dredd would be shut down cold.
So he found himself up on the roof, as Tyler explained what he'd discovered in the deep data their shadowy informant had given up. The files from West 17 Test Labs made a liar out of the late Tek-Judge Loengard, showing him to be not just aware of the Skorpion project, but in a key role as one of its creators. There were a handful of names of men and women involved in the weapons program, some of them no longer alive, others off-world. Tyler had already started search protocols to track them down, and with wry sarcasm he pointed out the name Vedder, Thessaly at the bottom of the list. "She's been in on this from the start," he noted.
And there was one more lead. A set of location co-ordinates out in the atomic wastelands tagged to a flight plan for Bravo Foxtrot-176, a Justice Department transport. Loengard's name was listed as operational commander for the mission. The date index on the record was two years old.
"The purpose of the flight was logged as 'radiological research'," noted Tyler.
"That's a front if ever I saw one," said Dredd, "and not a very good one, either."
"There's an anomaly here, though," continued the Tek-Judge. "I backtracked Air Traffic Control's records for that period and according to them, this ship was never registered as returning to Mega-City One. Apparently, there was a crash in the swamplands and Bravo Foxtrot-176 was lost with all but a handful of the crew. And guess who was the authorising Judge for the accident investigation?"
"Vedder."
"Give the man a prize. Yeah, Judge Vedder."
Dredd glanced up from the flight plan. "Two years ago, Loengard goes out into the Cursed Earth on a secret mission and comes back with most of his team in body bags. Two years ago the legit funding for Project Skorpion dries up. What the drokk happened out there?" He looked westwards.
Tyler shifted uncomfortably. "I know I'm gonna regret sayin' this, but there's only one sure way to find out."
"Approaching the Denver Death Zone," said Tyler from the cockpit. "We'll be landing in ten mikes, Dredd, so pop those rad pills before we unseal."
The Judge nodded and knocked back two of the chalky chemical tablets with a swig of water from his bike canteen. "What's the Geiger count out there?"
"Medium to strong," reported the Tek-Judge. "We'll be okay as long as we limit any exposure to a couple of hours max."
"Copy that," said Dredd, checking the load on his Lawgiver and the scattergun in his Lawmaster's draw holster. "This your first time in the Cursed Earth?"
"Negative. I did an Academy exchange tour in Texas City, took a Hotdog Run out to Alamogordo."
"Then you know the drill. We don't want to get into a shooting match with the local muties. We look for the transport, we keep out of sight."
Tyler glanced at him. "You sure we're gonna find it here? I mean, what if Vedder's report was on the money and the ship did ditch in the swamps?"
"That woman is a professional liar. The transport is here. Loengard must have known it, and our snitch does too."
The Tek-Judge slowed the H-Wagon into a hover mode. "We'll know for sure soon enough."
When it had first been created, stealth technology had been a mathematical construct of shapes and planar design, a form of manufacture that allowed aircraft to slip through detection grids like minnows through a trawler net, radar and thermal sensors rolling over them. As technology advanced into mass detectors and molecular displacement scanners, so the mechanics of stealth advanced too, each counter-invention trumping the one before; only those who stood at the state of the art could remain hidden from their enemies.
In the thrust wake of Dredd's iCON flyer there was a ripple in the air that to any outside observer would seem like a fractional shimmer of heat haze. It was all that there was to announce to the world that a second aircraft was mirroring Dredd's flight path toward the Denver ruins. Sheathed with a mimetic polymer, the stealth flyer undulated and morphed under the pressure of the air over its stubby winglets, the spongy exterior giving and flexing each time a trace of energy wafted toward it. Its skin was a neutral ghost-grey when inactive, dull like old granite, but under power a web of millions of sensors sampled the light frequencies surrounding it and matched pigment photocells. The ship was coloured like a patch of sky, lensing heat and other discharges from itself into a sub-dimensional energy sink, so not even the breath exhalations of its four-man crew escaped from within.
There were many craft like this flyer; most of the larger city-states had at least one such construct in their arsenals, and even the common Judges of Mega-City One had a lesser cousin in everyday service. But this ship was the pinnacle of man-made stealth aviation - at least until the newest models Hondo-Cit was constructing came off the production line. It was more than adequate to fly totally unseen by Tyler's scanners, and even a psyker would have found it hard to penetrate the muon scattering field that surrounded it. The ship had been within a few hundred metres of Dredd's aircraft since it left MC-1. On ample occasions, the crew had been presented with the chance to utterly obliterate Dredd and Tyler without the two men ever knowing where the kill shots had come from - but that was not the orders they had been given. It was imperative that Dredd's information source be pinpointed and eliminated, and for that a simple termination would not suffice. The crew aboard the ghost ship were to ascertain Dredd's intentions and then take the Judges alive, or, failing that, intact enough so that their dead brains could be sifted by a post-cognitive psionic interrogator.
Ahead of them, the striped H-Wagon decelerated, and with cool and silent care, the crew of black-suited operatives began to run through their weapons checks. Dredd had already cost them the lives of three valuable agents at the Resyk sub-station, and they would not underestimate the lawman again.
Wess kept the gun hand stuffed in the pocket of his radorak, turning from Jayni as she stalked around the apartment. She moved like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, slumped and fatigued from the exertion of a triple shift as well as from the drain of the night's drama.
"You ate all my munce," she said lamely.
"Buy you more," Smyth mumbled. "Sorry."
She dropped into a careworn chair. "I don't care about the food. It's you I'm worried about! Wess, you gotta level with me. What happened to you? I've never seen you like this and it's...." She shook her head, trying to blink away the need to sleep. "It's scary."
He felt his stomach turn over. Emotions churned inside Wess. He felt sick at the sensations behind those words, that Jayni, his Jayni would be afraid of him; and yet at the same time there was a part of him that liked that feeling. He had felt it in full force at the strip club, a giddy rush of power springing from the knowledge that he could cause fear. "I won't hurt you," he said, and he wanted to mean it. In his pocket, the gun was throbbing like a beating heart, and warmth spread up his forearm in pulses. The
weapon was doing something, but he couldn't be sure what.
Jayni's head lolled. "I... We should go."
"I can't. I have... things to do."
She gave him a blinky stare. "Wess, you always said you'd take me away from all this one day. That day has to be now. After what you did to Bendy..." The girl gulped air and shook her head. "Oh Grud, they'll skin you alive for it! And me too." She stifled a yawn. "What's... wrong with me? Feel so... tired..."
Wess shook his head in little nervous jerks, trying to ignore the hot gun. "No. No. See, this is, this is my chance, Jayni. Now I've got an edge on those bastards for the first time in my life, and I'm not going to give it up." He gestured with his other hand. "I'm sick of being picked on by Flex every time that red-faced drokker wants his kicks! They all laugh at me! They think I'm some kinda dreamer. Making up stories with big plans and no guts." Smyth's eyes were lit with passion. "I'll show them!"
She never heard him. Jayni fell off her chair and collapsed into a heap on the floor with a nasty clatter, and Wess's tirade died in his throat. He grabbed at her, awkward with her weight, and settled her back into the seat. She was slack and unresponsive, her breathing shallow.
"Oh, sneck! What's happened to her?"
"Non-combatant has been rendered inactive." The voice of the gun was in his head.
Wess whipped the mutant pistol out of his pocket and glared at it. The warm pulses were dying away now. "You? What did you do to her?"
"This unit is capable of multiple weapon vectors. Reconfiguration enabled use of subsonic neutralisation protocol."
"What?" He shook his hand and banged the merged flesh-firearm on the table. "What are you saying? Did you hurt her?"
"Negative. Non-combatant designation 'Jayni' has been given a low-level sonic stun. This unit ensured that user was not affected by the discharge."
"Why?" he shouted. "Why would you do that?"
"Non-combatant designation 'Jayni' is a tactical liability. Her neutralisation represented the best option for proceeding with tactical goals."
"No!" Wess spat at the weapon, and with his free hand he tore open one of the kitchen drawers. "You don't get to do this! You do what I say! You're not allowed to hurt anyone I don't want you to!"
There was a pause, and the lights on the pistol's processing module flickered. "User is incorrect. This unit has autonomous control of all tactical functions and will employ them in any combination required to achieve goals." There was something different in the synthetic voice, a hard edge that seemed almost human, almost angry. "Combatant will comply."
"Drokk you!" Wess screamed out the words and brandished a kitchen knife. "I'll cut you out of me!"
"Negative. Self-impairment of function is not permitted."
Smyth felt his muscles rebelling, the bones and sinew in his right arm turning against him. He tried to thrust the blade into his wrist and missed, stabbing the plasteen table. "Aagh! You piece of shit! What have you done to me?"
And then Wess felt himself become a meat puppet, floods of motion jerking through him down the gun arm and into his body. He twitched uncontrollably, but still it was enough for the weapon to slide around and come to rest inches from Jayni's dozing face. The trigger nerves went taut. "No, no! Please, no!"
The gun's muzzle dilated, the maw opening to present a broad blast pattern to the woman's head. The same point-blank kill configuration that had been turned on Dwayne in the strip club. "Observe, user," said the weapon. "This is a demonstration of force application. Compliance with mission assignments will result in mutual preservation of goals. Non-compliance will result in alteration of tactical evaluation. Ergo: non-combatant designation 'Jayni' will be reclassified as a priority target."
"You'll kill her!"
"If you disobey."
Wess sagged. "You didn't have to stun her." All the fight left him in a cold rush. "I would have done what you said anyway. I want those creeps dead."
"Target Cortez is currently of secondary importance. Combatant has new target assignment."
Smyth opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a squeak of pain. The thing was forcing something into his mind through the nanodes in his optical nerves, sparks of needle-sharp agony in his eyeballs forming into washed-out pictures. He screamed. A face was emerging, imposed on his sight like a purple after-image.
"This is your next target. Seek, locate and terminate."
Wess didn't know the face, but reams of tactical data were bombarding him through gurgling whispers in his ears and cloying scent-tastes in his mouth. "Why?" he asked again. "Why kill this man? I already murdered once for you!"
When the gun spoke, it made Smyth's heart freeze in his chest. "There must be a reprisal."
Where the city of Denver had once stood there was nothing now but a crater filled to a quarter of its depth by brackish, swampy water that swam with carcinogens and mutant germs. The Soviet nuke strike that had obliterated the metropolis in 2070 had atomised the steel, stone and glass in one blinding, star-bright flash; out beyond the impact crater were the flat ashen lands of the shockwave ring, still largely barren except for rad-weeds and colonies of bizarre insects that might once have been termites. It was only in the very outskirts that the DDZ showed any signs of ever being a place where humans once lived. Here, there were the husks of buildings that had been torched by the firestorms, and the ferrocrete bands of the transcontinental highways in confused ribbons of grey stone. Tyler circled the H-Wagon in tight loops, directing the sensor pallet downwards to find anything that resembled another aircraft.
Dredd kept one eye on the thermal scope. Nothing warm-bodied was moving below, but he'd seen enough mutants with freaky talents to know that was no guarantee they were alone.
A scanner pinged as the look-down radar struck a concentration of high-grade metals. "I got something," said Tyler, turning the aircraft back around for a second pass. "Partial read, buried underneath some rubble."
The senior Judge watched the train of sensor readings flicker into life. "Polycarbon, bi-phase carbides, titanium and steel. That's our wreck all right."
"Roger that," said the Tek-Judge. "I'm gonna set us down on that freeway overpass right there." He pointed to a stretch of old road uncluttered by the lines of rusted-out commuter cars dotted across the other streets. Dredd could see the white of human skeletons in the ancient vehicles, where Denver's citizens had died at the wheel as they fled their homes.
He looked away - and froze for a second. For an instant, Dredd's attention passed out the cockpit window toward the dull Cursed Earth sky. There; just the briefest hint of a shimmer in the air nearby, gone before his mind could properly process it. "Did you see that?"
"See what?" asked Tyler, concentrating on the landing zone. "I kinda got my hands full here."
Dredd looked away. "Never mind."
The iCON flyer touched down and listed slightly as the road surface gave a little under its weight. Tyler was ready to send them blasting back into the air at the first sign of a collapse, but the freeway was still solid, if a little decrepit. Dredd used a remote to drop the cargo ramp and rode out on his Lawmaster, with Tyler close behind on a Quasar Bike. The H-Wagon sealed itself shut behind them and went into active defence mode, the hull's electrostunner humming up to power.
"Stay close," Dredd snapped, and followed the derelict expressway down into a cross ramp.
"Check that out," said Tyler, pointing to a twisted collection of wrecks on one of the other slip roads. "Those look more recent than the other rust-heaps up here."
Dredd nodded. "That low-rider? A DuneRail, Mega-City Two manufacture. Maybe Mutanchero vehicles."
"What would they be doing here? It's not like there's any pickings in these parts for marauder bands. There's nothing here worth plunderin' that won't be glowin' in the dark from the rads."
"Yeah," agreed Dredd. "Whatever they were doing here, they never made it out to tell anyone about it." He rolled the Lawmaster to a halt. The highway slab ended with
a dramatic drop-off, fingers of steel rebar poking out of the ferrocrete toward a crossover that had long since buckled and fallen away.
Tyler parked his Quasar about face and walked to the edge. "I see it, I think. Looks like part of a hull, but there's rubble all over the place down there."
The fallen roadway had created a void sheathed in shadows. Dredd cracked a handful of chemical bio-lume sticks and tossed them over the lip of the road. The greenish-yellow glow showed a flat expanse of midnight-blue steel, and barely visible beneath a patina of rock dust, the tarnished gold of an Eagle of Justice. "Paydirt." He glanced at Tyler. "Coming?"
Through the long-range optics built into their combat gear, the four assassins watched the Judges draw cables from their bikes and lower themselves over the edge of the broken road. After a moment, they exchanged an unspoken set of commands and began a quick but silent approach, taking the longer route down toward the half-buried wreck.
Tyler unclipped the tether from his belt and drew his STUP-gun with one hand, using the other to wave a scanalyser over the hull beneath their feet. He had only gone a few steps when his boot sank into something soft and greyish. Instinctively, his lip curled and he scraped his sole against the fuselage to wipe off the sticky mass. In the half-light it was difficult to see what it was; the substance was gooey and adhesive, a glue-like mucus. Tyler cast a glance up at the broken road spars overhead. Was there something up there?
"Tyler. Quit rubbernecking." Dredd snapped.
The younger lawman frowned and glanced at his hand computer. "I'm not getting anything from the black box flight recorder. We should have been able to detect that from miles away."
"It's not here," Dredd noted. "They faked a crash in the swamps, remember? My guess is Loengard pulled the box and dumped it out in the Ozarks, make it look like that's where this bird went down."
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