Whiteout

by James Swallow

  The Judges were able to track any one of their number through a data chip embedded in the eagle-shaped buckles on their utility belts. The passive slivers of silicon didn't send out a signature of their own unless they were activated in an emergency; instead, street scanners detected their presence by bouncing signals off them and triangulating the location of each officer within the city confines. The Skorpion listened out for Dredd's ident code, each return from the lawman's receptor appearing on the map in Smyth's mind like a blink of warm gold light. The Judge had not moved from the same spot for several minutes now.

  "It might be a trap," mumbled Wess, the wind taking the words from his mouth. Up here, hidden among a forest of dead industrial chimneys, the breeze was cold and sharp.

  "Possible," allowed the gun. "That likelihood will be factored into assault plan."

  "Assault? We're going to kill Dredd, is that what you mean?"

  "Undetermined at this time." The weapon's bland voice seemed contemptuous. "Target designation Dredd is currently of low priority. However, he will lead us to high priority prime target designation Hollis Nolan."

  Instead of continuing with clumsy words, the Skorpion showed Wess its methodology, and Smyth felt his heart catch as the weapon explained how the Judge had been shadowing them since he made his kill at Samuel Seaborne Block. The criminal felt the same icy fear in his blood that had engulfed him in the seconds before Loengard had died, when Dredd had flashed past the window inside the con-apt. Another fractional second earlier, and it would have been the legendary lawman dead on the floor, not the Tek-Judge. Wess had the healthy fear of the Judges that was instilled in all of MC-1's low grade crooks, and Dredd most of all. The stone-faced enforcer was like a legend, the criminal equivalent of a child's boogeyman. He was a mythical figure, and even the influence of the weapon found it hard to override the ingrained fear of Dredd.

  The gun stung him with a dart of pain to keep his mind on track. Wess couldn't understand how the Skorpion had known this and kept it from him, but the weapon seemed less and less interested in how and what he felt as time went on. It pressed the knowledge into Smyth's reluctant mind. Dredd was shadowing the men on the Skorpion's kill list and now he had found the last name on it; it was a piece of tactical good fortune. They would home in on Dredd's location, and find him with Nolan - with a twenty-three point two per cent chance of error, of course.

  Wess began to slide back down the chimney, the wires hissing back under the lines of his skin. "Dredd won't let us kill Nolan," he said. "He'll try to stop us."

  "Affirmative," replied the gun. "Target designation Dredd will be dispatched as secondary mission goal if circumstances require."

  "What if I can't-"

  Each word came with a nimbus of horrible white-hot pain surrounding it. "Failure is not an option."

  Vedder decided not to waste the effort of affecting a neutral, subservient manner, and instead fixed the shadows on the screen with a sneer twitching on her lips. She had purposefully removed her helmet so there would be no mistaking the disdain she was exhibiting. "These constant interruptions do nothing but distract me from the work at hand."

  "You overstep yourself, Vedder," said the first shadow, the flat male voice crackling with distortion. "Do not forget whom you are addressing."

  She raised an eyebrow. "How can I? You remind me of it at every opportunity."

  "Don't test us, Agent Vedder," said the second shadow, a rising tone in its mechanically feminised speech. "Your, shall we say, eccentricities have been tolerated throughout the duration of this assignment only because you showed results. That balance is in danger of tipping."

  The woman gave a derisive snort. "I submit to you that my mission would be far better served if you stopped calling me away to justify myself every five minutes! How am I expected to perform if you constantly interrupt me?"

  "You are not in a position to influence policy, Vedder."

  "Really?" The COE operative licked her lips. "I think you'll find you are very wrong about that."

  There was a crackle of white noise. "Explain yourself."

  Vedder tapped a finger to her cherry-red lips. "Yes. Yes, perhaps now is as good a time as any to do that. I'm growing weary of your limited vision of this project."

  "You will regret-"

  "No!" she snapped at the darkened screen. "I regret nothing! I alone saw the potential of the Skorpion while you were content to poke at it and play with it like it was some laboratory animal. Did you think I was so foolish as to actually let the unit become lost by accident?"

  "What are you saying?" said the second shadow.

  "The crash on Braga Skedway was not a coincidence. I made it happen. I set the Skorpion free."

  The shadows froze, and Vedder knew that the synthetic image had lost signal for a moment. She smiled to herself, imagining the shock unfolding at her words at the other end of her transmission. When the voices returned they were loaded with annoyance, audible even through the vocal masking. "Why, Vedder? What possessed you to do this?"

  "I was surrounded by limited minds. Don't you see, the Skorpion could never achieve its full potential trapped in a research facility! It's a predator, and it needed to taste blood!" She nodded to herself, utterly assured of her own righteousness. "I know how it thinks. I know what it wants. When it finishes this hunt, the weapon will be ready for deployment anywhere we wish to send it!"

  "How can you know that?" demanded the second shadow? "What is to stop it killing and killing and escaping into the city, or the Cursed Earth, or off-world? If the Skorpion is lost, billions of credits will be wasted!"

  "I know it, because I know the Skorpion. While you sit behind your desks, I lived with the weapon, nurtured it. We understand each other."

  There was another long pause; and then the first shadow spoke again. "Vedder. This unorthodox protocol you have forced upon us will not be excused. And yet I find I am compelled to agree with its merits, much as it galls me."

  "She acted beyond her orders!" replied the second voice. "A breach of directives like this warrants termination!"

  "Indeed. But her evaluation of the weapon is correct. I concur with her actions. Even though I do not condone the methods."

  Vedder allowed herself a smile. "Then I may proceed?"

  "Yes. But understand this. If you do not bring the Skorpion to heel, you will not live to disobey us again."

  The woman disconnected the link and let herself bask in the moment of new-found freedom. They had seen the truth of her conviction. Now all she needed to do was prove it.

  "You read the files I left in your bike computer?" Nolan set down the gun and rubbed his hands subconsciously, as if the touch of it had made him feel dirty.

  Dredd nodded. "As much as we could decrypt."

  A weak smile. "Yeah, uh, sorry about that. I did it in a rush, when you were on site talking to Judge Loengard."

  "Loengard was part of the Project Skorpion team with you?"

  Nolan nodded vigorously. "Right, right. Him and Pang, ViSanto, me and some others. Vedder came later, though." He sighed. "Skorpion came under the umbrella of the rearmament program Chief Judge McGruder started, along with a whole bunch of other projects. Most of it was blue-sky stuff, wild and crazy concepts like time weapons, biogenic munitions and that sort of thing. But after East-Meg One had tried to waste the whole damn city, McGruder was hot on the idea that we should have something other than mega-nukes to defend ourselves."

  "I remember," Dredd noted. "I was there."

  Another nod. "Right, sure. You knew Judge Teape from the Apocalypse War, right? From what happened to Griffin..." His voice trailed off.

  "Teape saved my life. Let's leave it at that. Tell me about Skorpion."

  Nolan shifted uncomfortably. "We wanted to create an autonomous weapon system, but nothing we could come up with had the flexibility of an organic platform. I mean, like a human solider. So we took what we had and looked for a way to combine the two. See, we already had smart hardwar
e, like your Lawmaster bike..."

  Dredd frowned. "My Lawmaster doesn't have a mind of its own. It does what I tell it to."

  "True," said Nolan, warming to the subject, "but what if it could enhance what you did? Boost your human capacity with its artificial intelligence? That's what we did with Skorpion. We made it capable of independent thought. The world's first smart weapon, in every sense of the word."

  "But it couldn't operate without a human user."

  "That's right. We used a bio-active metal matrix that could adapt the core weapon unit to perform in whatever combat situation it encountered. Combine that with a human agent operator, and we had a true super-soldier."

  The Judge leaned forward, watching Nolan's eyes. "So what went wrong? What the drokk happened out there in the Denver Death Zone?"

  Nolan licked his lips. "It went insane."

  The rooftops flashed past beneath Wess's feet. He was a passenger inside his own flesh, his body ranging across the sides of citiblocks like a spider or launching itself across impossible gaps to snag on cables and stanchions. He was hundreds of feet up, the carpet of lights below blurry and indistinct. Highways and 'tweenblock plazas, zoom train rails, domes and towers all passed him by. They seemed flat and disconnected from his reality, like the false backdrops surrounding a holocade game. Smyth was an avatar of himself now, the real Wess subsumed under the control of the Skorpion.

  But it was more than that; the gun didn't just control him, not like a demonic spirit possessing an errant human skin - they were a merging of man and mechanism, the bio-silicon threads of the gun's matrix infesting him and remaking his flesh. He wanted what the weapon wanted, the weapon wanted what Wess wanted.

  And what both of them desired more than anything at this very second was to murder Hollis Nolan. To make him pay for trying to destroy them.

  Smyth's teeth grated at the very thought of the man. Nolan's static face, pulled from the Skorpion's data records morphed and layered on to Flex's laughing, shouting, bullying form; and so Wess hated him as much as he had the muscular thug. The anger burned his blood.

  Now and then, flickers of a voice - a woman, perhaps? - seemed to drift through their shared consciousness. Smyth reached out to touch the shards of memory, but the Skorpion got to them first, brushing them away. Nothing to see here. Pay them no mind. Concentrate on the task at hand.

  They stopped, their body heaving with effort, panting. Down below was Gothtown, dark and inviting.

  The non-standard, COE-issue sensor suite on Vedder's bike detected the mass of Dredd's Lawmaster in the gloom of the alley, and she took a wide detour to ensure the Judge's bike wouldn't alert him to her arrival. Pausing to check the ammunition in her pistol, she made a careful approach toward the apartment block. With a flick of her thumb, the Lawgiver's genetic coding tagger was deactivated, rendering any bullet she fired from this moment as untraceable. Vedder toyed with the ammunition selector switch. How would she kill him? Torched with an incendiary? Blown apart by high explosive, or perhaps the death of a thousand cuts from a ricochet round? She smiled again. She would see how the mood took her.

  "At first we thought we could solve the problem," Nolan said, his eyes glazing as memory took him back. "The lab tests worked well with the test subjects. We started with organic drones and lower phyla animals, but the bio-merge was too much for their limited brains to handle. Loengard wanted to move to human trials but the rest of us were all for shutting it down. That's when Vedder came along..."

  Dredd saw the blush rise in his cheeks. "You knew her?"

  "Not at first. Later, we..." Nolan looked away. "That's not important. I don't know how Covert Operations got involved. Doctor Pang told me that there were rumours that the COE and DeKlerk's people were watching the project from day one. Maybe they wanted the Skorpion for use by their own agents."

  "Makes sense. It's the perfect weapon for a lone operative, which is just how the spooks like to work."

  "So Vedder was brought in to monitor the program. She just made all the difficult restrictions go away. Suddenly we didn't have Acc-Div or West 17's oversight committee breathing down our necks, and we had all the funding and resources we needed." He took a shuddering breath. "Including human test subjects."

  "Lucky you." Dredd's voice was icy.

  "Not really," admitted Nolan. "Things got worse once human trials started. The first Skorpion prototypes were uncontrollable. They caused neural overloads in the users, a kind of mental trauma that wiped out everything but the most basic animal fight-or-flight reflexes. We called them 'whiteouts'. Every solution we tried failed miserably." He sighed. "I told Loengard that there was no way to make Skorpion work, but he wouldn't listen. Vedder convinced him that a field test was the way to go..."

  "So you took this thing to the Denver Death Zone and set it loose?"

  He nodded. "At first it performed perfectly, and then - whiteout. An uncontrollable killing rage."

  "I saw the tape," Dredd rumbled. "You must have been very proud."

  "I didn't want that!" Nolan replied bitterly. "I warned him! I warned Loengard not to do it but Vedder overruled me and men died! Poor Pang. That thing ripped him to shreds out there."

  "So Vedder and the COE covered it up. Loengard told the Council of Five the project was shut down and that was the end of it." The Judge rubbed his chin. "But it wasn't, was it?"

  Nolan seemed to deflate, as if the weight of the world was pressing down on him. Dredd had seen this before, when other men had confessed to him, like a dark shadow moving over them. "No, it wasn't over. Vedder turned the Skorpion program into a black bag operation and then she disappeared. But not before making sure she had enough dirt on all of us to keep us silent. We kept on working on it for two more years."

  Dredd was impassive, assembling Nolan's admission into his picture of the whole sorry ordeal. "Keep talking."

  The scientist wrung his hands. "We couldn't make it right. Grud knows we tried, Dredd, but we couldn't stop the Skorpion from driving its users mad." He leaned forward, gesturing with his fingers. "It was the core intellect matrix, you see. It had always been flawed. The Skorpion itself was a sociopath. And we realised there was nothing we could do to change that. Even Loengard saw sense in the end. He told Vedder that the project was over, no matter what the COE wanted. He sent the last prototype to be destroyed. They were going to throw it into the geothermal magma tap at the Power Tower."

  "And that was three days ago. The night of the wrecker attack on Braga Skedway."

  Nolan's gaze dropped to the floor. "The stealth truck carrying the unit never made it to the rendezvous. When Loengard found out he did everything he could to cut off any connection between the Skorpion and us. But now it's too late. She set the thing loose, the stupid witch!"

  Dredd stood up and crossed the window again. "If the Skorpion is as dangerous as you say, why would she do that?"

  He looked up, a wounded expression in his eyes. "Because Vedder loves chaos, that's why! She was always pushing for live-fire tests. She said we couldn't learn how to cage it until we let it run wild. Vedder was the one who first suggested the personality imprints." When Dredd didn't respond, Nolan's aspect grew fearful and he grabbed for the laser gun. "Judge? What is it?"

  "Get away from the window!"

  The rest of Dredd's words were drowned as the ceiling blew out in a storm of masonry and brick dust.

  The gun spat flexible wires that hissed through the air and struck Nolan in his side. The scientist screamed, the laser carbine tumbling ineffectually from his hands as Wess let the Skorpion assume full control of him. The wires went taut and began to reel the target up into the apartment above Nolan's.

  Dredd reacted with lightning speed, snatching the las-gun and turning it upward. A fan of red lit the dust-filled room and severed the cables with spitting fury; Nolan fell back to the floor in a crumpled, moaning heap. The Judge discarded the gun and drew his own weapon. A fallen support girder hung down, the angle shallow enough for Dredd t
o use it as a makeshift ramp. He leapt on to it, and in three deft steps he was up through the ragged hole in the ceiling - and face-to-face with the Skorpion.

  Something of Wess Smyth was still in there; he saw it in the way the gunman hesitated, the plasma weapon keening. "Don't make me kill you!" Dredd barked.

  "I was thinking the same thing," Smyth's voice was thick with change and mutation. The gun twitched and spat white streaks of fire at the Judge.

  Nolan crawled through the dust and debris, all feeling on the right side of his body gone where the steely darts of the wire were still sticking out. This was a kind of pain he had never encountered before, a heavy weight on his flesh and bones, forcing the air out of his lungs with each step.

  The laptop computer. He kept the shape of it in his mind. He had to find it. Find it before he died.

  He could hear the sounds of gunfire and destruction from above, drifting down to him in a vague sort of way. Nolan inched across the wrecked apartment, fingers questing. His hand touched a curve of green plasteen. A boot; a Justice Department-issue boot.

  "Hollis," Vedder's voice was honey and needles. "Still alive. Good for you."

  Nolan tried to look up, but he couldn't raise his head that far. She was a haze above him, just random shapes and colours. "Huh. Here you are."

  "Yes. Here I am." She sniffed, glancing up at the ruined ceiling as Dredd and the Skorpion traded fire. "I told you not to be so dramatic, Hollis. You should have listened."

  Nolan didn't hear the words. He saw the laptop, still intact, concealed under a chunk of fallen ferrocrete. Dredd would know what to do with it.