Whiteout

by James Swallow

  "Directive: This area is compromised. Combatant must depart immediately or risk capture."

  Wess held back vomit. "Maybe I want the Judges to catch us!" He blinked away sweat from his eyes. "Yeah! If you won't stop this-"

  "Wesson Smyth," it said, the voice hard and cold in his psyche. It had never addressed him by his name before. "Pay attention. We are inseparable. You must do as directed. No other outcome is acceptable."

  "What are you gonna do?" he snarled back. "Jayni ain't here now, you can't threaten her no more!"

  "We do not wish to harm non-combatant designation 'Jayni'. The mission is for the good of us both. Jayni will benefit."

  Wess's brow furrowed and he panted, unable to form a cogent question. The gun kept talking. "Our mission goals are not exclusive. You understand. This unit can help you achieve what you want."

  "What I want?" Smyth mumbled. "What do I want?"

  "The termination of your oppressors. The death of your enemies."

  And he found himself nodding, of his own accord this time. The hot flow of power around his hand was returning, but this time it felt good. It made Wess feel stronger, potent. He stroked the memories of his beating at Flex's hands. The bruises were all gone now, the swollen contusions eaten and repaired by the nanodes. "Yeah. That's what I want."

  By the time the patrol Judges got to the scene, all that was left was a scorch mark where Dolenz's car had kissed the barrier.

  "I thought the rads out here were enough to keep anyone away from this wreck," said Tyler.

  "Guess again," Dredd grunted, drawing his Lawgiver.

  The Tek-Judge strained to listen. "I don't hear anything." He frowned. "Maybe it was just the metal settling. Probably because we disturbed it, or something."

  "You really want to take that chance, be my guest." He glanced at the computer cores in Tyler's hands. "Do we have what we need?"

  "I think so-"

  "Then we should get the hell out of this wreck." Dredd led the way back down the distorted corridor, the torchlight from his wrist beacon bobbing and weaving.

  Tyler followed him across the transport ship's drop bay, the broad deck canted at a shallow angle. "These things usually carry, what? A Manta Prowl Tank, or something?" In the middle of the bay there was a steel gantry of some kind, like a metallic crucifix. "You think-" The Tek-Judge's words were silenced by the unmistakable oiled click of a weapon safety catch disengaging.

  Dredd thumbed the control on his Lawgiver to heatseeker as the flat, accentless voice issued out of the air.

  "Drop your weapons, or you will be killed."

  The Judge saw the faint trace of shadow on shadow and aimed at it. "You first."

  "You are outnumbered. Surrender or die."

  Tyler had his gun out as well. "How many?" he whispered out of the side of his mouth. As if in answer, the four assassins stepped out of the dark and into the weak pool of light cast from Dredd's torch. Each had a stubby pistol with an emerald targeting laser reaching through the air. Two green dots hovered over Dredd's badge, two more over Tyler's.

  "You're not gonna kill us," Dredd growled. "If you wanted us dead, you could have tossed nerve gas in here or shot us the moment we walked in."

  One of the targeting dots dropped to hover over the Judge's crotch. "There are more painful things than dying."

  "I'll take the chance."

  Tyler blinked. "Don't feel you have to speak for both of us, Dredd. I'm quite happy with my parts where they are."

  Dredd ignored the Tek-Judge's facetious rejoinder; his artificial eyes saw something else moving in the deep shadows, shapes on the walls and the ceiling behind the assassins. For a moment, he thought the killers had brought help, but they didn't react to the new arrivals. The Judge saw the release control for the drop bay's ramp close by. If it still worked, they could use it to escape instead of getting past the four black figures and whatever they had brought in with them.

  "Who sent you?" Dredd demanded, moving slowly toward the control panel, gun as steady as a rock. "Vedder? Only Covert Operations can field stealth gear like yours."

  "Last chance," said the lead assassin. "Guns on the deck or you'll both be screaming all the way back to Mega-City One."

  One of the other agents jerked around, catching sight of something from the corner of his eye. Dredd saw the carpet of black forms whisper forward in a quiet wave. "If I were you, I'd be more worried about your bug problem."

  The spiders came into the aura of the torch ankle-deep. They swarmed over the assassin at the rear in a rush of legs and mandibles. Mutated claws and venomous fangs sank through the plasti-kevlar stealth suit, injecting a paralysing toxin into the man's body. He fell, choking off a half-cry that the voice modification circuits in his mask rendered into a hollow howl.

  "Back!" Dredd shouted, lunging for the drop ramp switch. His fist slammed the button home and the ramp opened - but only a little.

  The three COE agents were in disarray, and Tyler's jaw dropped in stunned shock as the black arachnids flowed around them, skittering up their legs to savage them. The assassins fired blindly, bullets sparking off the deck in orange glitters. Some of the spiders turned toward him and Tyler switched the setting on his pulse pistol to wide-angle, high-energy. He fired, a broad fan of yellow scorching the deck. Some of the bugs coiled up into balls where he singed them, others side-stepped like they knew where the shots were going to hit.

  "Forget them! Get through the hatch!" Dredd aimed his Lawgiver and snapped out a command to the voice recognition sensor. "Incendiary!" He released three rounds in quick succession, the combusting rounds igniting fireballs across the deck. Spiders squealed and died.

  Tyler was taking his own sweet time about escaping, and Dredd shoved him through the gap, out of the VTOL's hull and into the rubble beneath. "Come on! Once those things taste blood, they go into a swarming frenzy." They ran as fast as they could, crouched beneath the fallen ship's wings. "If those creeps are the same crew as the one that shot up Resyk, then they'll be wearing self-destruct charges!"

  They reached the dangling cables; Dredd took out more spiders clinging to the wires, waiting for them. Behind, in the depths of the transport, a muffled crack of explosive noise sent the ground trembling beneath them. "Bike!" Dredd spoke into his helmet mic. "Haul us in, now! Emergency speed!"

  The Tek-Judge barely had his gloves on the cable clip when it shot upward, dragging him with it like a robo-trout on a line. Another chug of detonation came up behind them and flipped the two men over the edge of the broken road.

  Tyler's Quasar Bike teetered as the ferrocrete road crumbled beneath it. Dredd took a fistful of his uniform and shoved him on to the back of his Lawmaster. Tyler held on and Dredd kicked the motorcycle into high gear, roaring away down the decrepit overpass. Looking backwards, the Tek-Judge gawped as the road dropped into the pit behind them, more explosions burying the ship, the killers and the spider colony under tons of broken masonry.

  "This..." Tyler coughed on the dust. "This sorta thing happens to you a lot?"

  The vehicle park at Fillmore Barbone was a ferrocrete box, with a few disconsolate islands of weak illumination from lamps that the local go-gangs hadn't got around to smashing. Smyth left Jayni's podcar in her allotted spot and crossed the dark expanse. He heard giggles and chattering from a cluster of Barbone B-Boys; normally, he would have tensed up at the sight of six punks in their ugly regalia, but with the gun throbbing at his side he gave them no mind at all. The go-gangers spared him a wary look when he passed by, but not one of them gave out a challenge or a spit of derision. It was a brutal thing, an animal-level kind of knowing that radiated off Wess. The punks could smell it on him, a subconscious marker that warned them away. Don't touch this one.

  It was the gun's doing. Smyth wondered about how the machine was changing him, straightening his walk, sharpening his senses. He wondered if on some level he should be worried about it; but those fears were falling away from him now. On the bridge, that white flash
of pain had made him feel as if he was reborn. The old Wesson had been hammered down and shuttered away; this new take on him was hard-eyed and deadly, like some guy out of an action-movie vid.

  At Jayni's apartment the front door opened with the lightest touch of his hand. Wess's eyes flicked to the lock. The plasteen frame was splintered where someone had used a prybar to gain access. He drew the gun and stepped inside, a nervous tic making his eyes twitch.

  The small hab was a ruin. Everything that could be smashed had been smashed. There was no rhyme nor reason to it; it was just a tornado of senseless violence that spoke volumes to Smyth. The cocksure attitude he'd been sporting began to slip from his grasp. His mouth opened and closed, unable to force Jayni's name from his lips. The gun arm dropped to sag limply at his side as he moved from room to room, his heart tightening in his chest as he opened each door, peered into each cupboard, terror building at the thought that the next one would hold nothing but blood and her ruined, pale body. He was convulsing at the conflict that churned in his gut. The real Wesson Smyth, the part of him that was the weak and venial man he had always been, flapped like a bird trapped in a cage, panic smothering his reason. The new personality, the clinical killer mindset imposed on him by the chill logic of the gun, struggled to keep the other in check; but cracks were forming.

  He found it in the bedroom. Her clothes were strewn everywhere, ripped and scattered under his feet; everywhere except on the bed, where a careful patch had been cleared in order to draw attention to a solitary vid-slug in the middle of the duvet. There was a note next to it, with words scrawled in bright crimson lipstick. Wess remembered the colour: Venus Sunrise. Jayni liked to wear it for Fridays at Bendy's.

  "Watch Me," the note demanded. Wess took the bullet-shaped video slug with a trembling hand and sat on the bed. He found Jayni's tri-d set on its side under a pile of peephole bras and loaded the player socket. He felt sick and hollow inside.

  The slug unspooled. Wess saw the jerky point of view of a hand-held vid-cam, tracking up from the dirty floor outside the elevator bank. Down the corridor. Stopping at Jayni's apartment. There were muffled voices; a brief difference of opinion as the cameraman wondered aloud if this was the right place.

  The matter was settled when a steel rod forced the door open and the angle changed. He saw Jayni there on the sofa, still asleep where he had left her. Wess's heart leapt into his mouth when a humming laser blade emerged from left of frame and hovered close to her neck. His head jerked around to look through the doorway and out at the sofa in the living room, as if he could look back through time to stop what was unfolding on the vid-slug.

  Rough laughter. The beam knife snapped off and the camera moved as the person using it handed it to somebody else. Wess saw shots of the floor, of legs and feet. There were two, maybe three people there at the time. Jayni made a drowsy noise as a large figure picked her up from the sofa. Wess recognised Quiet Mike doing the heavy lifting.

  "Take her down to the car. If she wakes up, put her to sleep again."

  "Flex!" Smyth spat the name at the sound of the thug's voice.

  The camera moved again as the other men went to work on trashing the place. Flex's face filled the screen, florid and lit with cruel amusement. "Who do you think you are, Smythy?" he asked. The shock of being directly addressed made Wess blink. "You had a sneckin' brain fart, you little spug?" A grin split the face. "The Eye is very concerned, Smythy. I reckon you need to explain things to him, personal-like." Flex bent out of shot and came back with some of Jayni's underwear. He gave it a sniff, like it was a fine bouquet of flowers. "Your little stripper bitch can keep us all entertained while he waits for you." The thug held something circular up to the camera lens and gave him an odious wink. "Know where to find us, eh?"

  Wess stabbed a finger at the vid-screen's pause control, freezing the image. The object in Flex's hand was a one hundred-credit poker chip, stamped with the logo of Cortez's mobile casino aboard the Carnivale.

  The autopilot in the iCON put them on a rapid boost-and-glide arc up over the Cursed Earth and back down toward Mega-City One. Tyler took the time to run a full spectral scan over the ship's hull, to make sure none of those horror-show arachnids had made their way on board while the H-Wagon had been parked in the Death Zone. Dredd mentioned something about having dealt with the spiders before. "The black plague", he called them, and with stony gravitas Dredd described how he had ordered the use of a nuclear warhead inside the city limits to finally end an infestation of them. Tyler gave a nervous laugh and went back to the scan.

  Dredd used the flight to watch the footage on the memory cores. The monitor screen before him showed streams of telemetry from the two year old weapons test. Grim-faced, he saw the deaths of the Mutancheros and the brutal, feral manner in which they were dispatched. He thought of the dead men in the VTOL again.

  The Skorpion; all this time he had been expecting something simpler, just a weapon, just a gadget that would be inert if he could ensure it was taken out of the wrong hands. But this thing was something else. It was smart.

  "Deploy recovery team, I want the unit on ice and in standby mode until we complete debrief-" It was Loengard's voice on the playback, cool arrogance boiling into hot panic. "Abort! Do it now!"

  "I warned you! Damn you, but you did not listen!" Dredd didn't know the second voice. Someone from West 17, he guessed.

  "Whiteout! Neural overload!"

  "Stop it! Kill it!"

  Then there was screaming, gunfire and hysterical, inhuman yowls. After a while, the audio track went silent; and then came a last crash of sound as the Skorpion killed itself.

  FLASH BLIND

  It was raining again in Sector 88. The water made the megway shine like a dark mirror, reflecting the streetlights and the headlamps of the rushing cars. From the pedestrian bridge at 945th Street, the whole of the sector's main highway artery was visible. Wire mesh fences climbed high from the guardrails; jumpers were commonplace here, with dozens of miserable citizens taking their own lives on a weekly basis by leaping off the bridge. If the fall didn't kill them, the traffic always did.

  The Judges had tried a number of ways to make the bridge less attractive to MC-1's suicides. First the fences went up; then they were electrified. But still the innovative and the self-destructive found ways around them. Wess stood in the shade of an autobooth, the toughened vid-screen display showing a kindly, warm-hearted face. The vox speaker had been ripped out by vandals, but the screen kept up a ticker-tape of upbeat babble-speak, imploring anybody thinking about taking the big leap to talk to a psycho-shrink counsellor droid before they did it. Most people didn't realise that the main purpose of the autobooth was to alert the Judges; suicide was illegal in Mega-City One, and even contemplation of self-murder was considered grounds for a stint in the kook cubes.

  Smyth wrapped his fingers around the stun coils in the chain link fence and pulled. The metal gave easily under the strength of his still growing muscles, the electro-charge harmlessly licking around his grip in little blinks of blue lightning. Despite the cold of the evening, he was sweating heavily, the dull metallic odour of his body mixing with the ozone discharge. He understood enough to know that it was the nanodes in his blood giving off the heat, the thermal waste generated by the molecule-sized machines radiating out through his pores as they worked inside him. The gun explained in its terse and clipped way that it was making him better, allowing the two of them to perform in a more efficient manner. He couldn't deny that it had made him stronger. Wess's body had taken on a bulk and dimension he'd never seen before, the flab around his gut siphoned off and the raw muscle in his torso and limbs changed by degrees from soft and pallid to hard and tight. It meant he had a ravenous appetite all the time though, and not just for human food.

  On the way here he'd stopped for a pair of K'ni-!vi'Sk blintzes at the alien eat-o-mat, wolfing down the purple maggoty things without batting an eye. He felt twitchy with the changes, his nerves sparking and making him fli
nch every now and then. Smyth was afraid of what the weapon was doing to him, but at the same time he liked it more and more. It was as if he had two voices arguing inside his head, one of them the old slow Wess Smyth panicking at every shadow, the other parroting the cold mechanical mindset of the gun. He blinked at the strangeness of it; sometimes the arguments were so loud he thought he would go crazy.

  Wess heard the engine note of the Carnivale before he saw it. The deep bass thrum of the massive mopad's motors reached his ears, the sound of the twenty giant tyres on the rain-slicked highway. He gave the fence a last tug and it folded back and away. There was a graffiti scrawl on the lip of the bridge that read: "Dan Depresso Jumped From Here". It was a good spot to throw yourself from, right above the central cruise lane where the autotrucks and mega-juggers rode. Smyth balanced on the edge as the Carnivale came into view. The mobile palace was a huge brick of glass and steel, ringed with pink neon and blue-white chaser lanterns. It looked as if a piece of the red light district had split off, iceberg-like, from the city proper and gone roving around the streets. The name of the casino hovered over it in a nimbus of blurry holographic lettering.

  Smyth's lips moved involuntarily as he read the sign aloud. His feet tingled, and for a moment the artificial bravado the gun had pumped into him waned. He became aware of what he was planning to do; he became fearful.

  In sense-pictures and synthetic feelings, wordlessly the weapon reinforced its will upon him. It told the petty crook that they needed each other now, that nothing could divide them. It told Wess that Jayni would die there in that glittering mobile cesspool unless he released himself to the power it represented. The gun stoked up memories of Flex and Cortez, of their callous laughter and constant tirades of abuse; and suddenly Smyth's doubts sank beneath a tide of long-nurtured revenges.

  He jumped.