The Skorpion took over; the nanodes had seeded the criminal's brain tissue with thousands of molecule-thin receptor antennae, minuscule stimulant rods that pierced his grey matter in precise places. Small charges of electricity, of the correct voltages, in the correct locations could incur changes of emotional state or physical reaction. It was simply the newest incarnation of a most ancient medical technique - a form of acupuncture enhanced by machine intellect, grounded in the theory of the failed MACH programs of the late twentieth century. The gun had been learning Wess Smyth like an instrument, and now it played him.
Colour bled from his vision, and the last thing he felt was the plasma gun go active. Hot light flared and blood boiled into steam, but Wess knew none of it; his mind was overwhelmed by the whiteout.
Tyler gave a low whistle as the laptop's screen lit up with data windows. "Holy Mother of Grud. This is it, the complete low-down on the Skorpion Project." He glanced up at Dredd where the Judge leaned over his desk. "Nolan gave you this?"
"Right before he choked to death on his own blood. Tell me there's something in there you can use."
The Tek-Judge pursed his lips. "Talk about your 'embarrassment of riches'. There's terabytes of date storage in this thing. It would take me months to sift through it all."
Dredd snarled. "It may have escaped your notice, but we have a bio-mech killer on the loose. I need a way to stop the Skorpion now."
"Right." Tyler nodded. "What about that sensor program I set up? Are we still tracking him?"
The senior Judge gave a grim nod and toggled a data channel on Tyler's screen. It was an aerial view of a block park, lit by the harsh sodium glare of an H-Wagon's searchlight. The concrete and grass were a mess of deconstructed and burning dead. "Found this at Gary Gygax. Perp was long gone. He knows we're on to him."
Tyler paled at the brutality of the kills, visible even from such a wide angle. "Who were the victims? Cortez's people, or someone from West 17?"
"Neither. Just some unlucky eldos in the wrong place at the wrong time." Dredd shook his head. "Nolan's dead and the game has changed. This thing is calling open season on anything it takes a dislike to."
"I know the feeling!" Dredd turned as Judge Woburn entered the Tek-Lab with two SJS officers flanking her. "I'll take that computer, Dredd. It's evidence."
"I don't think so," Dredd replied. "This has nothing to do with the Special Judicial Service."
Woburn's nostrils flared. "It does when a senior Judge tosses the regulations away and starts making his own judgement calls in the Chief's name!"
"Hershey agreed-"
"Hershey did nothing of the kind, and you know it!" the woman snapped. "The Chief Judge spoke to me less than an hour ago. She's on her way back from the conference, and she's not happy with you, Dredd."
"No change there then," Tyler said quietly.
"I'll take whatever censure Hershey wants to deal out," the Judge responded, "but after the Skorpion is on ice." He gave Woburn a hard look. "I'd suggest that in the meantime you skull-heads do your job and find out how Judge Vedder knew where to find Hollis Nolan."
"Vedder shot Nolan?" said the Tek-Judge. "It's bad enough the Skorpion knew how to find him. He covered his tracks pretty well for a civvie."
"I've said all along that thing was smarter than we thought," added Dredd.
"Vedder had an inside source at street level." Woburn's brusque manner softened a little. "Judge Keeble. Frankly, SJS has had its doubts about him for some time. We suspected he was a weak link. Vedder must have seen that and exploited him."
"No wonder he kept hanging around all the time," Tyler noted. "He must have been listening in after the Carnivale incident."
Woburn nodded. "His partner, Lambert, she saw him sending a message to Vedder. By the time we got it out of him, Dredd was already blasting up half of Gothtown."
The other Judge's lip curled. "Try to move a little faster next time. You could have saved us a lot of trouble."
Tyler broke in before Woburn could frame an angry retort. "Vedder is too clever to have left Keeble a way to find her - but with all due respect, she's the secondary concern right now."
Dredd nodded again. "Can't argue with that. So unless you want to arrest me, Woburn, I'd suggest you don't interfere with my investigation."
The SJS Judge eyed him. "You really think you can corral this thing?"
Tyler turned back to the laptop, a renewed look of determination on his face. He was silent for a few moments. "Maybe I could use Nolan's data to reconstruct a model of the Skorpion's program."
"A copy?" asked Dredd. "Which helps us how?"
"No, not a duplicate, just a replica. I couldn't make another Skorpion unless I had access to the labs and about ten years of R&D time. No." He tapped a few keys and brought up a stream of complex AI code. "With this data I could create a virtual analogue of its thought process. It might give you an edge in a confrontation."
Dredd's eyes narrowed. "If I can isolate this thing, you can help me beat it?"
"That's the idea," Tyler seemed animated by the challenge. "But I'll need some help to pull this off-"
"Recruit whoever you need," Woburn broke in. "Pull them off active duty if you have to. This machine psycho has to be terminated before anyone else dies."
Dredd raised an eyebrow. "Glad to see you're on board."
She gave him an arch look in return. "Don't get me wrong, Joe. You'll be up before a review board when this is all over, but I wear the badge just like you, and this Skorpion can't be allowed to turn the Big Meg into its own private slayground."
Tyler looked up. "There's only one problem. How the drokk do we get this thing to come out of hiding?"
"I've got some ideas," Dredd noted, "and if we're lucky, we'll net Vedder into the bargain."
The Justice Department Overt Media Division was the home to the department's private broadcast studio; largely used for important transmissions like administration declarations and the yearly State of the City address, it also was home to government-sponsored programming like Judge Pal and Friends, Informant Hotline and the ever-popular MegCrimeWatch. In the event of an emergency, it could also be used to send a blanket signal to every home vid, tri-d and street screen within the city boundaries.
Dredd stepped up to the podium bearing the Eagle of Justice and tapped the microphone. "Is this thing on?"
The robocamera gave him a thumbs-up. "You're on the air, Judge Dredd."
"Citizens," he began. "The murderer Wesson Smyth, formerly of Chet Hunklev Block, has been found guilty and convicted in absentia by me. His sentence is death; however, as Smyth is still at large and unwilling to turn himself in, it is with great reluctance that I am forced to endorse a judicial edict to transfer responsibility for his crimes to his accomplice, Jayni Pizmo, formerly of Fillmore Barbone Block."
"No!" Wess's shout reverberated along the alley beneath the street screen.
"Sentence to be carried out tomorrow," continued Dredd. "Pizmo's right of appeal is hereby annulled."
"He can't do that..." Smyth's heart felt empty. He tasted salt tears on his cheeks.
"Smyth," said the face on the screen, and Wess glanced up at it. "The Maze. Dali Plaza. Sundown. It's you or her."
The billboard blanked, returning to an advert for GrotPot. The gunman sank to his haunches and stared at the bloodstained barrel of the Skorpion. "You... made this happen."
"It is a trap," the weapon grated. "Target Jayni has no value. Her death is irrelevant."
Wess slammed the gun against a dumpster. "No, drokk it! She has value to me! I won't let her die!" He spat angrily. "Dredd wants a showdown, let him have it!" Smyth sniffed. "Unless you think we'd lose."
The gun went warm. "Negative. We can take him."
Wess bolted to his feet. "Then let's do it! You wanna show people how tough we are? You want them to be afraid? Let's finish it, let's kill Judge Dredd! Then no one will ever hurt us again!"
"Agreed," said the Skorpion.
&nbs
p; SHOWDOWN
Dredd glanced out of the H-Wagon's window, and gave a curt nod to the sleek shape of the Citihawk fighter flying escort alongside. Rex's "head", a cluster of sensors and detector tubes beneath the nose of the aircraft, returned the gesture and, with a flash of exhaust, it peeled off. Rex's orders tasked the flyer into a steep orbit pattern over the heart of Sector 50, the look-down scanners trained on the open roof of Dali Plaza.
Tyler leaned closer so he could be heard over the engine noise. "You really think Smyth will show?"
Dredd didn't look away from the window. "Reckon we got a fifty-fifty chance. If the Skorpion has flushed out anything that's still human in him, then we'll have wasted our time. I'm thinking there's still some of the man in there, though."
"How can you be sure?"
"A feeling." Dredd remembered the look in Smyth's eyes on the Carnivale when the Pizmo girl had seen him, and again in that moment before he fled the fight in Gothtown. Somewhere in the pit of that man's soul there was still a piece of the person he had once been. The Judge only hoped that it would be enough.
The Tek-Judge looked past him, and through the window to the vast, brick-coloured sprawl of the Maze. The fading sunlight of the day made it glow an autumn gold. "Looks pretty from up here. Hard to believe what I heard about this place. Is it true that folks in there went mad and turned cannibal?"
"Among other things," Dredd allowed. "It's a miracle it's still standing."
As the H-Wagon began to descend, the true, decaying state of the Maze complex became more apparent. Opened in 2094, what was then known as the F Lloyd Mazny Housing Scheme was the brainchild of the titular architect, a massive development project funded by the city to provide accommodation for Mega-City One's ever-increasing population. At the time, Mazny's elaborate creation was a tour de force, and rightfully declared itself the most advanced housing complex on Earth. What made the construction so unique was Mazny's use of non-Euclidian design. He invented radical features like the Klein Plaza, the Kaluza Tesseract Park, the Möbius Loop Pedways and the prospective-twisting Halls of Escher; but the geometry of the place was nearly impossible to navigate, turning a short trip down to the shops into an excursion that could last for days.
Mazny solved the problem with a computer control system that directed the inhabitants through comm-panels and adaptive signposts; but the architect hadn't reckoned on the destructive nature of the typical Megger punks. In less than a month after the Maze had welcomed its new occupants, every signpost had been vandalised beyond use and the computer system went into critical meltdown trying to direct the increasingly terrified residents. City maintenance mechanoids, sent in to fix the system, became hopelessly lost in the warren of corridors and never returned. In the wake of a panicked exodus from the complex, the Judges declared the site closed and left it to rot - although citizens continued to trickle out of the place for months afterward, many of them driven insane. It became a haven for mutants, illegal aliens and vagrants, and the subject of many urban myths. Mazny himself vanished in the wake of the calamity, allegedly changing his face and identity to escape the wrath of angry survivors, and the Maze Collapse became the subject of numerous psychological dissertations, best-selling books and an award-winning tri-d movie, Mazed and Confused.
The H-Wagon settled to the ground outside the Maze, engines revving to idle, and Dredd dropped from the hatch. Tyler watched from the open door as the Judge strode over to a parked pat-wagon and a cluster of officers on Lawmasters.
"Dredd." Lambert got off her bike and presented him with a small case, embossed with the Eagle of Justice. There were black-and-yellow hazard stripes across the sides and a large warning symbol on the latch. "From the lab boys at Tech 21, just like you asked."
Dredd ran his thumb over the sensor plate on the case and it snapped open. The Judge gave Lambert a look. "Good work with Keeble. Can't have been easy for you to turn him in."
She returned a defiant glare. "No. But he was dirty, and that's one thing I won't stand for."
Inside the case was a block of clear plastic holding six bullets. Lambert instantly recognised them as the custom high-velocity rounds used in a Lawgiver pistol. Dredd pocketed the shells and handed back the case. As he turned to the waiting H-Wagon, she called out, "You think you can take this freak?"
Dredd glanced over his shoulder. "Reckon."
Lambert nodded at the Maze, the structure dark and menacing in the early evening glow. "Strikes me that you picked the worst place in the city to face him down. That thing is a warren. Hundreds of places where a perp could go to ground."
"If the Skorpion escapes, you'll be able to track him. I had weather control seed the air over Dali Plaza with inert rad-partcles. Anyone going in or out of there in the next few hours will light up like a beacon on a radiation scanner."
"What about back-up? Snipers with Long Guns, spy-in-the-sky drones?"
"Negative. It's gotta be me."
"That thing is dangerous. It's smart."
Dredd shrugged. "Better hope I'm smarter, then." He walked back to the H-Wagon, loading the new bullets in his gun as he went.
Vedder's silenced pistol spat death and the last of the crazed scavs fell to the floor. She stepped over the corpses and ignored the less militant jackals, who emerged from the shadows to strip the dead she left behind. The COE agent found a good vantage point in the long-abandoned coffee shop and used a fallen piece of counter as cover. From where she sat, almost all of Dali Plaza was visible. It hadn't been easy getting there, but the Maze's mad byways were not totally impossible to navigate, given that one had the right equipment and a willing guide. Her erstwhile pathfinder was dead now, his body coming apart in the hands of the weaker scavengers across the way. By tonight his flesh would be filling their bellies.
She sniffed. Poor saps. They were just sub-humans now, once the homeless and the deprived, but they had made the mistake of wandering into the Maze - and now they had been turned feral by the shifting, crazed design of the place. Vedder ran her gaze over the ill-formed shape of the plaza and felt an unwelcome twinge of vertigo. Hardly surprising; living in a place like this would be enough to drive anyone out of their mind.
The sound of jet engines reached her and she concealed herself. The woman caught sight of an H-Wagon as it made a quick touchdown and take-off. It left Dredd there in the centre of the atrium, his weapon holstered and his aspect stony. Vedder sneered. He had come alone, after all. How typically arrogant of him.
"You old fool," she murmured. "You'll wish you never came."
Dredd scanned the plaza, peering into the lengthening shadows around the ruined storefronts and untended, overgrown plants. He saw movement here and there, but it was sluggish and disordered, the more daring of the scavs drawn out by the noise of the H-Wagon. He filled his lungs and shouted.
"Smyth! Step up, if you have the guts for it. I'm giving you until the count of five. Then I'm calling Justice Central and the Pizmo girl will get a one-way ticket to Resyk." He drew his belt microphone. "One. Two."
More movement, behind a stand of unkempt trees. "Three."
"Four." Dredd raised the mic to his lips. "Fi-"
The shot was as thin as a needle but deadly accurate. Dredd felt the now-familiar aura-burn of a plasma bolt as it struck the handset and blew it into gobs of hot plasteen. He reeled away, drawing his Lawgiver. More shots peppered the cracked flagstones near his feet. The fight was on.
Dredd returned fire with two quick squeezes of the pistol's trigger. A pair of titanium-rubber matrix bullets was released, and the ricochet rounds created a wild chorus of screeching impacts as they bounced off the plaza's walls and floors. The Judge took the distraction and ran forward, vaulting over the remnants of a ruined food court. From the corner of his eye he'd seen the flash of the plasma shot, one level up, toward the gutted mouth of a HyperCube Mart. If the Skorpion was following its programming, then it would have already moved from there; he had to be quick to catch it, put it on the defensive.
"Smyth!" he yelled again. "You're prolonging the inevitable! Give yourself up and the Pizmo woman walks! Keep this up and she'll answer for your crimes!"
His only reply was a strangled noise, a shouted denial cut off by a choking gasp. Another searing flash of plasma fire roared past him, catching one of the dead trees in the courtyard and setting it instantly aflame.
"No good," Dredd said aloud. "Gotta put him on the defensive, not me..." He sprinted at the inverted escalator staircase that lead to the upper levels; like most of the things in Dali Plaza, they were half-functional, half-illusory. The mag-grip stairs let him walk upside down like a fly-dancer, and the mirrors on the walls warped and distorted Dredd's image. More fire snapped at his heels, but the bolts were striking his multiple reflections and not the Judge himself.
At the top of the stalled escalator, Dredd threw himself into a crash dive and rolled up to a firing stance. The freakish backdrop of the plaza had saved his life; but the Skorpion would compensate quickly, learning from its mistake. He had to make the most of his advantage before it became redundant.
Vedder watched Dredd slip through the shadows where the evening dark was thickening and granted him a reluctant smile. He was good, as much as she didn't want to admit it, and fast on his feet for a man old enough to be her father - but there was something else going on here, she could sense it. Her finely honed sense of suspicion tingled in the back of her head. If he had wanted to, Dredd could have just used a squadron of Manta Prowl Tanks to bomb Dali Plaza flat and bury the Skorpion under tons of rubble. But that wasn't his way, was it? Dredd wanted to be sure, he wanted to see that worthless dupe Smyth dead at his feet. She frowned, a momentary regret crossing her expression. Perhaps the petty thief hadn't been the ideal choice after all, but then that was what happened when one stepped out of the laboratory and into the random nature of the real world. Smyth's human weakness had brought him here; but perhaps Dredd's gambit would work in her favour. If Smyth killed him, his woman would surely perish and that would burn out any last trace of humanity the man possessed. The whole great experiment she had set in motion with the truck crash was coming to a conclusion here. In its own way it was thrilling, observing the weapon as it finally, truly reached its deadly potential.
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