She watched the play of gunfire between the two combatants, irritated at the old Judge's ability to stay alive against the superiority of the Skorpion. Even Dredd shouldn't have been able to survive two confrontations with the weapon. She saw him hesitate in the gloom, one hand pressed against the side of his helmet. Dredd's lips moved in a whisper, the shadows too thick for her to read his words.
A sudden thought struck Vedder. There's someone else here. Dredd had brought reinforcements with him to the Maze. Who else could he be talking to? Even as the idea formed she knew it was Tyler. The irritating Tek-twerp from Luna-1 had proven too clever for his own good all through this business. She scanned the plaza, thinking. If he were here, it would be somewhere with a vantage point as good as hers. There! Across from her on the third level, the remains of a Euclid Burger franchise with a wide sundeck. Vedder drew her gun and approached silently.
"Sixty per cent probability of a scatter-shot attack in the next minute," Tyler hissed into his throat mic, watching the data scroll up the screen of Nolan's computer. "Advise you pre-empt with diversionary fire."
"Copy," replied Dredd, and the Tek-Judge heard the familiar report of a Lawgiver Hi-Ex round. The predictive model of the Skorpion reacted - just like the real thing, he hoped - by retreating and seeking different cover.
Tyler smiled. "Drokk," he breathed, "this is actually working!" He'd had his doubts, his stomach lurching with barely-contained fright as he dropped from the departing H-Wagon as it slipped over the roof of the Maze. Anyone watching Dredd after the Judge disembarked in Dali Plaza would have missed Tyler sneaking in after him. Now all he had to do was keep concealed and keep up with the combatants until Dredd's moment came. They would only get one shot at this, and it would have to be enough; but with Nolan's data, the Judge finally had an edge on the inhuman killing machine.
A new data string unfolded across the screen, flickering and then solidifying. There was an eighty-three per cent chance in the next thirty seconds that the Skorpion would try to gain a firing angle on Dredd from an elevated position. Tyler read out the prediction in an urgent rush.
"Got it." Dredd's gaze snapped upward; sure enough, there was a thin one-way pedestrian bridge arcing over his head, the cubist frame of it covered with dozens of melting clocks. Something shimmering and black caught the light as it moved up there. The Judge grabbed a flare shell and snapped it into place on the muzzle of his gun.
"Keep moving, combatant!" The Skorpion's commands beat at Wess's mind like fists, the compulsion of the buzzing voice forcing his legs to piston. It took him to places he didn't want to go, dancing him around like a robot under remote control. Smyth could barely sense the rest of his body; all that seemed to matter was the hard core of perception that looked down the gunsight of the plasma weapon. Everything had collapsed to that cross hair view of the world. He ached with the need to frame Dredd's hard face in those brackets and feel the pulse of fire as the Judge was flashed to ashes.
"Jayni..." The word escaped his lips, thrown out from the depths of his psyche. "Can't let Dredd hurt..."
"Concentrate!" The gun's synthetic speech roared in his ears. "Forward!"
Wess darted from cover and across the footbridge, dimly aware of Dredd below, vulnerable to his attack. The thought of it made him salivate; but it sickened him too, twisting his gut. The Judge was hard to kill. In the Carnivale and the apartment block, the Skorpion had taken the upper hand almost from the start - but here and now, things were different. Dredd moved like he had psychic insight, one step ahead of every tactic the weapon threw at him. Wess felt the building flood of the Skorpion's anger and frustration behind his eyes, burning like a torch. It had never before met an opponent it hadn't been able to kill at its leisure.
A chug of gunfire from the Judge's pistol went wide of the footbridge, and Smyth bared his teeth at Dredd's poor shot - but then the star-shell round exploded above and revealed him, the oily black of the skinsuit stark against the phosphorus glare.
Before the Skorpion could react, there were Hi-Ex rounds chewing into the ends of the footbridge with orange balls of fire. Dredd's shots shattered the pedway beneath Smyth's feet and he fell, blocks of ferrocrete and broken liquid timepieces tumbling with him.
"Yeah!" Tyler pumped the air with his fist. "Got the varmint!" He estimated that Dredd would have only a few seconds before the Skorpion reacted to this chain of events. Fingers flying over the keyboard, the Tek-Judge configured the data model of the weapon's artificial intelligence to give up its next move. "Dredd, it's gonna-"
Tyler never finished the sentence. Too late, he heard the footfall behind him, the boot crunching on a thirty year-old fragment of broken glasseen; too late he was turning, grabbing for his sidearm.
Vedder had fixed the egg-shaped silencer in her utility belt to the barrel of her Lawgiver, and when she shot him the only noise was a flat hiss of exhaust gases and the wet smack of damaged meat, as the standard execution round entered Tyler's back, just above his right kidney. The bullet passed through him and into the flatscreen monitor of Nolan's computer, splashing dark blood over the keys. The Tek-Judge slumped, gasping at air. The COE agent put a second shot into the laptop, just to be sure, and walked away.
Tyler tried to speak, but there was nothing but agony.
"Tyler? Tyler!" Dredd heard a thin gasp through his helmet comm, and then nothing. "Drokk it!"
The Skorpion gave him no time to ruminate on what fate had befallen the Tek-Judge, and without Tyler's second-guessing Dredd fell back on good old-fashioned reflexes. The black-clad figure erupted from under the cairn of fallen masonry in a shower of dust and fire. Streaks of plasmatic darts tore across Dredd, cutting into him, burning sooty scars on his uniform jumpsuit. One dazzling flare scorched the brow of his helmet, shredding the respirator unit in the crest and grazing the clear visor.
He returned fire with armour-piercing rounds; but the Skorpion had learned from their last confrontation, and this time the penetrator shells were deflected away by shifting planes of sloped armour forged from bone and cartilage. Smyth spat out grunting howls of pain, and pitched a chunk of stone at the Judge with his free hand. Dredd ducked the clumsy blow and staggered back. The ferocity of the attack was incredible.
"Let Jayni go!" Wess yelled, stepping backward. The gun wavered. "Do it or I kill you!"
Dredd took a breath laced with needles; the damage to his ribs had barely healed and the speedheal patches under his clothing were struggling to hold closed the wounds from the Resyk confrontation. Biting back the pain, he ejected the clip from his Lawgiver and slammed home a fresh magazine. "You know what you've become, Smyth? You let that monster inside your head and you know what it's capable of. There's only one way out of this. You know that." In his mind's eye, Dredd saw the corpse of a similar black-clad murderer in the wreck of the VTOL ship, skull vaporised by a self-inflicted wound.
Wess glanced at the fusion of flesh and metal where the plasma gun ended and the meat of his body began. "Noooo!" The word was strangled, metallic, and Dredd knew instantly that it wasn't the man speaking; it was the Skorpion. "Organic vector override. Target Dredd... Target Dredd..." Smyth's head tilted to look the Judge in the eyes. Hollow hatred danced there. "We know how you think, Dredd. We have your skill. You can't defeat us."
"I'll take that bet."
The gunman twitched. "Yes. Yes. Like the ancient ways. Two men. Champions." Smyth's tongue flicked out of his mouth like a snake's. "Showdown." The Skorpion dropped to waist height, aiming at the ground, and Dredd followed suit.
The Judge locked everything out of his mind, shutting away all thoughts and concerns of anything beyond the ten metres of ground between the two of them. Smyth, if he was still in there, was beyond help now. Dredd worked the thumb selector on his Lawgiver and took a breath. A smile, jerky and unnatural, hung on the other man's face.
How many times had it come down to a moment like this? Dredd asked himself the question in the space between the heartbeats. How man
y adversaries had he faced down, one to one, mirroring the ancient confrontations of lawmen from centuries past? Junior Angel. The Solar Sniper. Moonie's robo-gunslinger. The list went on and on. Even his own clone-brother Rico had met him in single combat, mano a mano. Suddenly Keeble's words returned to him: "That guy's gonna run out of luck sooner than he thinks." His jaw hardened. Lucky was what citizens and perps were. He was a Judge, and Judges relied on skill, on fifteen years of tireless training in the strictest academy on Earth and a lifetime of street experience. Luck got people killed.
With utter calm and cool assurance, Dredd spoke a single word: "Draw."
Nanodes colonising Smyth's nerves and neurons flashed with power, working the muscle and sinew of his arm, bringing the hungry maw of the plasma weapon to bear. It had already predicted the trajectory and impact point of the refined energy bolt building in the breech, projecting a solid hit in the middle of Dredd's gold shield and through his heart.
Wess poured all that he could, the final iota of his human force, into the weapon, and it twitched for a fraction of a second. The faintest of pressures resonated through the gun arm; but just enough.
The Skorpion stung him with blistering pain for daring to interfere; but it was already too late. The shot went wide.
Dredd's bullet struck the frame of the mutant gun and discharged an inferno of red-orange flame, turning meat and metal into hot slag. The backwash from the blast roared in his ears. Tech 21's "Hellfire" rounds were still in the developmental stage, and far too powerful to be used as a field alternative to the standard incendiary shells; but here and now they had performed perfectly.
Smyth, the Skorpion, whatever the man was, collapsed to the ground, clutching at the ruined stump where the gun hand had been. Tyler had discovered in Nolan's notes that, with enough raw material and time, it might have been able to regenerate the firearm. Dredd raised his Lawgiver. He had five more Hellfires and no intention of letting this abomination draw breath for one second longer.
"Yes....Yes..." The voice was feeble, plaintive. "Do it. Kill me, Dredd. But please, Jayni..." For the moment, the weapon had left the wreck of a man in charge.
"Wesson Smyth," Dredd began. "I hereby restore to you full responsibility for your crimes and absolve Jayni Pizmo of same. Your sentence is death." The Lawgiver loomed large. "Sentence to be carried out immediately-"
Dredd's gun flew from his hand with a screech of metal. He whirled as Vedder emerged from the shadows, her silenced pistol smoking. "Oh, Joe. Always with the formality, eh? Why didn't you just shoot him and be done with it?"
"Justice must be served," Dredd growled. "Pity you spooks never understand that."
She sniffed. "You put up a good fight, for sure. But I'm sorry, I can't let you terminate something worth fifty billion credits just because it got upset and killed a few citizens. I'm sure you understand."
"A 'good fight'?" Dredd sneered. "This isn't some game. You let a psychotic murderer loose on the city, just to see what would happen. I don't know which one of you is sicker. At least that thing," he jerked his thumb at the mewling gunman, "didn't have a choice. It was made that way. But you? You did it because you wanted to."
"Oh, spare me your righteous indignation, Joe." Vedder rolled her eyes. "The Skorpion will benefit Mega-City One in ways that your ridiculous laws never will. With the data this test has accumulated, the next generation units will be better, faster." She smiled. "No city in the world will be able to oppose our agents. There will be a whole swarm of Skorpions, and we'll use them to enforce our will across the planet." Vedder beckoned Smyth with her free hand. "Come on. Come to me. I'll take you where you'll be safe."
Dredd glanced at the injured man. "She's going to cut it out of you, Smyth, you know that, don't you? She doesn't care about you. She just wants the Skorpion."
"Don't listen to him!" Vedder snapped, gesturing with the gun. "He was going to execute you a second ago! I can help you, Wess. We can make you whole again."
Smyth staggered toward the COE agent. "You? You did this to me?" He looked down at the mutations wrought on his body. "You did it?"
The woman flashed a plastic smile. "I can make it better. Trust me, Wess."
He hesitated for a long moment; then Smyth held out his other hand, the metallic cables rippling beneath the surface of the darkened flesh. "Help me?"
Vedder reached out to him.
Smyth's arm came apart in a storm of meat and steel. A web of wires burst out of his limb and slammed into the woman like a forest of arrows. Vedder's muscles jerked and her gun went off, a single high-density AP round punching though Smyth's forehead. The COE agent let out a strangled shriek and fell, a hundred strands of bloody bio-metal piercing her every vital organ.
Wesson Smyth's skin was slack, his face pallid and waxy with death. Dredd's lip curled in disgust as the body jolted, muscles mis-firing, electrical stimulus animating the dead flesh. Smyth's jaw moved and heavy words were forced from his lips. "Nohhh. Life... Target. Taaah Get."
Dredd's Lawgiver was lying on the ground a few feet away. The Judge recovered the weapon, and without words or ceremony, unloaded the five remaining Hellfire bullets into Smyth's corpse.
The pyre cast dancing flickers of light across the bizarre shapes of Dali Plaza and the impassive visage of the Judge.
Hershey closed the file with a key press on her data pad and gave him a level look. "Can't I leave you alone for five minutes?" she asked dryly.
Dredd said nothing.
"I feel Judge Dredd exceeded his authority on a number of occasions during this investigation," began Woburn, "almost resulting in the death of Luna-1 Tek-Judge Nathan Tyler-"
"Tyler survived," Dredd rumbled. "Good Judge. Tougher than he looks."
"No thanks to you," Woburn replied. "Then there's the abuse of the Pizmo woman's rights, the property damage in Gothtown, unauthorised use of city hardware. I could go on."
"Yes," agreed the Chief Judge, "you could. But I see no need, as I have all the relevant details here. Citizen Pizmo was released, yes?"
"She was questioned. There was the possibility of collusion with Smyth." Dredd remained impassive. "I understand Judge Lambert handled the situation. She found Citizen Pizmo to be innocent and recommended the woman be re-housed. I suggested the new development in Sector 990."
"Rather up-market, wouldn't you say?" Woburn sniffed. "Those habs are luxurious, certainly compared to the con-apts in the Double-Eight skid district."
"I wouldn't know," said Dredd.
Hershey rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Look, I'm spacelagged and I'm cranky, so I'll make this short. We don't have anything in the way of evidence to support the allegation of COE involvement. Vedder is a corpse, the Skorpion and Smyth are ashes, Nolan's computer is destroyed and anyone who was involved with the project is dead." She sighed. "By executive order, I'm declaring this investigation closed. Woburn, your objections are noted and denied. Dredd..." Hershey gave him a hard look. "Joe, unless you got something for me, I want you back on the street and busting heads."
"I have no further evidence." Dredd bit out the words.
"Then get out of here. I have a meeting," snapped Hershey. "Hearing adjourned." The gavel in her hand struck the desk with a sound like a gunshot.
In the Grand Hall's atrium, Woburn caught up with Dredd. "Is that it?" she demanded. "No promise to keep on searching, no vow to bring the COE to justice?"
"What do you want from me, Woburn?" he growled. "I'm a Judge. I do my job."
"So do I. It's just that you and I see it differently."
"I agree. The difference is, my way is the right way."
The SJS Judge snorted. "But you don't believe that Vedder acted alone, do you? You think the COE and DeKlerk were in this up to the neck."
"Supposition is nothing without proof, Woburn. Unlike you skull-heads, I can't arrest another Judge on a whim." He strode away, leaving her behind.
"They're getting away with it, Dredd," she called after him.
"For now," said the Judge. "But we'll see."
"I renew my objections to this operation," said the woman, the shadows deepening on her face as it creased in a frown. "All this money and time and effort, all wasted because of one idiotic agent."
"Vedder was not an idiot," snapped the man, hooded by the semi-darkness of the dusky room. "She was a valued operative. It was only her judgement that was impaired in this case."
An angry snort. "That was enough. We pride ourselves on the dispassionate execution of our mission. We put aside our own concerns for the safety and security of our city. But your precious agent forgot that. She decided that she was better suited to evaluate those concerns, not her superiors. Not us."
"Granted, I admit that with hindsight, perhaps another agent might have been a better choice for this protocol. But Vedder had the correct skill set and training, and she showed an affinity for the Skorpion that no one else had."
"An affinity, is that what you call it? She treated it like a pet. At the end it was an obsession!"
"Yes." The man looked away. "I suppose after the incident in Uranium City she should have been retired. I had hoped this mission might redeem her." He sighed. "I do so hate wasting good material."
Whiteout Page 22